This female-founded start up has developed an AI that can spot breast cancer

Thanks to the hard work of Dr Geetha Manjunath

A company in India have developed a non-invasive test that uses thermal imaging and AI to detect breast cancer at an early stage.

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women today. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in every 12 women have the risk of a breast abnormality. Early diagnosis is critical to decreasing mortality rates.

Niramai, which was founded by Dr Geetha Manjunath has developed a novel software-based medical device to detect breast cancer at a much earlier stage than traditional methods or self-examination. Their solution is a low cost, accurate, automated, portable cancer screening tool that can be operated in any clinic.

The solution uses a high resolution thermal sensing device and a cloud hosted analytics solution for analysing the thermal images

Their imaging method is radiation free, non-touch, not painful and works for women of all ages. “The core technology of our solution has been developed using our patented machine learning algorithms for reliable and accurate detection of breast cancer,” the company explains on its website, “This unique solution can be used as a cancer diagnosis test in hospitals, for regular preventive health checkups, and also for large scale screening in rural and semi-urban areas.”

Dr Manjunath lost both her cousin’s and sister in law to last stage breast cancer. She joined forces with her former colleague Nidhi Mathur, (who was a senior product manager at Xerox, where Manjunath also worked) to start the company.

Although less reliable than mammography, the test is a low cost solution that can help spot early cancer in people from low social economic backgrounds who may not have access to mammography screenings.

Niramai stands for “Non-Invasive Risk Assessment with Machine Intelligence” and in Sanskrit, Niramai means ‘being free from illness.’

The core of  Niramai’s solution is Thermalytix, a computer aided diagnostic engine that is powered by Artificial Intelligence. The solution uses a high resolution thermal sensing device and a cloud hosted analytics solution for analysing the thermal images. “Our SaaS solution has been developed using big data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning for reliable, early and accurate breast cancer screening.”

Dr Geetha Manjunath

Niramai Thermalytix has been validated in systematic clinical studies in reputed hospitals. Thermalytix is regulatory cleared in India. Kenya, UAE and has obtained a CE Mark for European countries. Recently Niramai SMILE-100 which has subset of features of Thermalytix got US FDA clearance.

You can read more about Niramai’s clinical trials here