Artificial Intelligence May Hold Promise for Early Identification of Cervical Cancer in Women

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Global Good have created a computer algorithm capable of identifying precancerous changes in women which place them at risk of developing cervical cancer. Known as automated visual evaluation, this new form of artificial intelligence (AI), "has the potential to revolutionize cervical cancer screening" for women in low income communities worldwide by giving their healthcare providers the ability to use digitized images collected during routine, annual screenings for cervical cancer to identify potential precancerous changes. According to America's National Cancer Institute (which is part of the NIH), this technology holds the promise of enabling physicians to more quickly catch and treat such potential changes before they develop into cancer, and could eventually replace visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) -- the current method of screening used by healthcare professionals who work with limited resources in challenging medical care environments -- a testing system which is "known to be inaccurate." The researchers involved in this project "trained" the machine learning algorithm (automated visual evaluation) to recognize patterns in medical images and other "complex visual inputs" by digitizing and entering more than 60,000 images from an NCI archive of photographs which had been collected from more than 9,400 women in Costa Rica during a 1990s cervical cancer screening study which included follow-up studies for roughly 18 years. These images subsequently enabled the algorithm to "learn" which "cervical changes became precancers and which did not," according to NIH representatives, who added that the AI approach to cervical cancer screening was developed by NCI researchers in collaboration with the Intellectual Ventures Fund, Global Good, with findings confirmed independently by personnel from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), another component of the NIH.