The Silicon Review ^Asia

Microsoft is collaborating with India’s SRL Diagnostics in a move to sharpen its AI infrastructure in detecting cancer.

The collaboration will help the tech giant to train its AI to find traits of cancerous cells. Till now, pathologists manually carried out the process by using a slice of the patient’s tissue on a glass slid. For training the AI, slide from past diagnosis will be used from SRL’s storage bank.

According to Microsoft, this cancer-detecting solution is not a replacement for oncologists, but it will boost the AI and help the doctors to make the correct diagnosis and treat accordingly. This will cut down on cost and time and make healthcare, in general, more patient-centric.

The tech giant will be able to use biopsy images with the labeled diagnosis of a doctor for each one of those. For SRL, the AI could possibly replace the current method of using biopsies for cell abnormalities.

Microsoft has chosen India for several of its AI in healthcare pilots; it is believed that the company is working out on its capabilities for global consumption. Furthermore, the tech giant has started partnering with many healthcare providers across the world to acquire patient’s data from those regions to master its AI system as well.

“If you look at AI in general, it’s very good at taking a set of data, reasoning over it and providing insights. This is the same in healthcare, where access to good data combined with the power of machine learning, AI and cloud computing can provide doctors or healthcare providers with insights to make the right diagnosis,” says Anil Bhansali, Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D).