Tirupati researcher shows AI can detect cervical cancer, suicidal tendency

Artificial Intelligence (AI), now in its nascent stage, can actually help prevent formation of tumour due to cervical cancer and also prevent suicidal tendency among the youth, a study by Tirupati-based researcher Lalasa Mukku has found.

Ms. Lalasa, developed a learning system that can detect cervical cancer almost almost five years before the formation of a tumour. “AI-based colposcopy image analysis enables early detection of cervical precancerous lesions. This helps in identification of cervical cancer risk up to five years before malignant tumours are formed,” Ms. Lalasa told The Hindu.

Having studied up to post graduation in Tirupati, she pursued her PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at CHRIST (deemed to be university), Bengaluru, on ‘A multimodal temporal hybrid deep learning model for cervical cancer detection’ under the supervision of professor Jyothi Thomas.

Quoting a study by GLOBOCAN, she said India recorded over 1.23 lakh new cervical cancer cases and nearly 77,000 deaths in the year 2020 alone. However, the five-year survival rate for cervical cancer diagnosed earlier is close to a mind-boggling 90%.

In the absence of trained specialists to periodically monitor the cervix, Ms. Lalasa’s system teaches a computer to read the images. The study uses colposcope, a camera-microscope to photograph the cervix. An AI module called ‘Enhanced Gaussian Mixture Model’ isolates the cervix region to get clarity.

When colposcope images collected periodically from a patient is fed into the system, it tracks how tissue colour, texture and vascular patterns shift as cells change. As a cervix moves towards cancer, the morphological patterns show up, making it easy to identify before a tumour becomes ‘clinically detectable’.

“When validated on patients, this model achieved an accuracy of 94%, recall rate of 95% and an F1 score of 94.21, superior than the diagnostic accuracy of specialists”, Ms. Lalasa observed. Her work bagged three national patents and was carried in twenty plus SCOPUS peer reviewed publications.

Suicidal tendency

Ms. Lalasa also worked on a project to determine anxiety levels in youth and prevent suicidal tendency much before they reach a crisis point, thus offering scope for timely intervention. The work was published in an SCI indexed journal with an impressive impact factor of 13.9.

Her invited talk on this theme received wide appreciation at the 3^rd international conference on neuroscience and psychiatry conducted by Scientex Conferences in Dubai in 2023.