Collecting data to develop an AI powered screening assistance tool and accelerate disease diagnosis
Tackling the world’s oldest disease with the latest technology. Leprosy is an infectious disease that mostly affects underserved populations. Although it has been largely eliminated, still about 200’000 new patients are diagnosed annually. In the absence of a diagnostic test, clinical diagnosis is often delayed, potentially leading to irreversible neurological damage and its resulting stigma, as well as continued transmission.
The AI4Leprosy project focused on the creation of an AI powered diagnostic tool to detect leprosy with the help of image analysis. Novartis Foundation, Microsoft AI4Health and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation collaborated to collect, examine, and process anonymised skin lesion images and symptoms from leprosy patients in Brazil. The main goal of the project was to increase accessibility to an accurate method of classifying leprosy to assist clinicians, especially in remote communities. The data were used to train an open-source AI powered model able to assess the probability of having leprosy. The AI models implemented had a satisfactory accuracy of 96.4%. This tool could be used by collecting Images through a smartphone app. The rollout is foreseen to happen in remote rural and urban environments in Asian and African settings, with the aim to remediate any selection bias that would have been introduced in the piloting phase.
“This may enable us to eliminate the world’s oldest known disease with the newest technology we have available”. The use of this digital technology can truly support us to accelerate In the last miles and make leprosy history once and for all” – Ann Aerts, Head of Novartis Foundation.