IIIT Hyderabad develops smartphone AI for early oral cancer detection

Timely detection of disease, particularly cancer, is an imperative for the future course of treatment, be it drug-based, surgical or both.

Hyderabad: Timely detection of disease, particularly cancer, is an imperative for the future course of treatment, be it drug-based, surgical or both.

In their efforts for an early detection of oral cancer, International Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT’s) – Hyderabad IHub- Data and INAI have come up with a smartphone-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology.

---

According to the researchers, a simplified image-based AI and ML solution can now assist in preliminary screening via early detection of abnormal lesions that could potentially lead to oral cancer.

In a study titled ‘AI-Assisted Screening of Potentially Malignant Disorders’ commissioned by the IIIT-Hyderabad INAI, an applied AI Research Centre of the Intel, and Telangana government, researchers explored the potential of AI in detection of abnormal lesions of the oral cavity, which is medically known as Oral Potentially Malignant Disorders (OPMDs), from the smartphone-based photographic images of the oral cavities.

The researchers obtained smartphone-based images from a curated database of community outreach programmes for early cancer detection Research led by Vivek Talwar and Dr. Pragya Singh found that the simplified AI solution could indeed label images as suspicious and non-suspicious with an F1 score, an evaluation metric that measures the model’s accuracy, of over 70 per cent.

Further, the researchers also discovered that clicking pictures on smartphones with a white light ensures consistency in imaging and eliminates the need for methods that use other light sources.

According to researchers, the AI and ML solution by design is aimed at being efficient and easy to use by healthcare workers at community level. They are working on further innovations in the quality of screening and migration from current web app to phone app that will accelerate solution deployment.

“Innovation in the quality of screening and future deployment through the mobile app will help improve the capturing of oral cancer incidence rate in community setups,” said Konala Varma, CEO, INAI.