Improving women’s health in remote regions with digital pathology
Point-of-care diagnostics based on a combination of mobile-sized scanners and artificial intelligence (AI) are helping save the lives of women in low-resource settings. The AI technique is being applied in Kenya and Tanzania to deliver screening for cervical cancer – now the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women in that region and a bigger cause of death than childbirth.
The project, which sees microscope scanners wirelessly connected via mobile networks for deep learning-based image analysis, was outlined at the Digital Pathology and AI congress in London in December by Professor Nina Linder. She explained that in parts of Africa there are less than four pathologists for every million people, underlining the importance of the drive towards automated diagnostics. Linder is a Principal Investigator in the studies, along with Professor Johan Lundin from Karolinska Institutet and FIMM and Professor Andreas Mårtensson from Uppsala University.
The solution from the Scandinavian team uses minimal infrastructure for point-of-care diagnostics and sees a high-quality sample collected from a local medical centre with the Pap smear digitized with a low-cost scanner and transferred to a cloud server over mobile network for remote diagnosis by a pathologist, AI, or a combination of both. The result is then sent back to southern Kenya or Tanzania. Linder pointed out several advantages of point-of-care AI-based diagnostics, such as allowing remoted consultations, decreasing workforce burden, monitoring disease outbreaks and storage of image data.