IIT Develops AI-based Detector for TB

Very soon cost effective, time saving equipment to diagnose tuberculosis (TB) caused by the mycobacterium, malaria, intestinal parasite, and cervical cancer would be available as the researchers from Indian institute of Technology (IIT-D), Delhi have developed a low costing 'Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based low-power electronic hardware system', a device which is estimated to bring down the detection time of the deadly disease from two days to few milliseconds.

The device has been designed by the students of Department of Electrical Engineering: Khushal Sethi, Narayani Bhatia, Vivek and Shridu Verma. The team was headed by the Professor Manan Suri of the same department.

With detecting the disease in a few seconds, the device can also be used for healthcare access in resource-constrained areas with limited access to human specialists.

"While several software AI models exist for healthcare and diagnostic related applications, need of the hour is to efficiently map these models on portable dedicated low-power, low-cost hardware to enable edge-AI systems accessible to all in low resource environment," said professor Suri.

The researcher says that TB is one of the top10 causes of death worldwide and 39 percents of the population is at risk of malaria. "Rapid screening of TB is possible, but the service accessibility is still poor in rural areas and require specialized equipment that is not readily available," said Puri.

Further as per the data shared by the team, cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women, and seventh overall, with an estimated 528,000 new cases and 266,000 reported deaths worldwide.

 Intestinal parasites infect the gastrointestinal tract of humans. They have a consistent external and internal morphology throughout the different stages of development that is egg, larva and adult stages.

The professor added that microscopy is particularly well adapted to low-resource, high disease burden areas, being both simple and versatile; even for diagnostic tasks for which newer technologies are available the cost of specialized equipment may render it impractical in such places.

"Such diagnosis requires skilled persons and there is a critical shortage of skilled technicians in our country. Thus, diagnoses are often made on the basis of clinical signs and symptoms alone, which are error-prone and lead to higher mortality, drug resistance, and the economic burden of buying unnecessary drugs. Hence, such alternatives will provide an access to quality diagnosis that is currently unavailable," said the professor.