Cusat develops an ingenious technology for the grading of breast cancer with collaboration of Intel Technology Pvt Ltd

 

Cusat develop Breast Cancer Grading technology in association with Intel Pvt.ltd

The artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision lab of the department of computer science, Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) has developed an ingenious technology for the grading of breast cancer in association with Intel Technology Pvt Ltd.

This early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer will definitely  increase the chance of recovery and chance of survival. The non-invasive radiological diagnosis using ultrasound, mammography, and MRI are widely used for the diagnosis of breast cancer at present.

A novel automated technique known as ‘NASSGAN’ was developed by Cusat scientists for discriminating different cancer grades.

Technique based on semi-supervised learning(SSL) framework, combined with the deep neural network-based generative adversarial model, was developed by the researchers for discriminating the different cancer grades.

Breast cancer grade is presently determined manually, by the microscopic investigation and analysis of the biopsy samples. The manual microscopic examination and grading is tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. It demands the automation of the process.

The proposed model can considerably reduce the need of annotated data, reducing the time and cost. The  work has been published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, according to an official release.

Intel has developed a hardware architecture with Intel Xeon scalable processors using distributed training to reduce the training time and to support the experimentation with multiple image resolutions without memory constraints. Four Intel Xeon scalable processors are used as a compute cluster without any deep learning accelerators for the model training, said the communication.

The work was carried out under the expertise of Dr. Madhu S. Nair, Associate Professor, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision Lab, and Dr. Asha Das, former Research Scholar, Department of Computer Science at Cusat and at present Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Union Christian College, Aluva, with the technical support of Mr. Vinod Kumar Devarampati, Intel Technology Asia Pvt Ltd, Singapore. Intel engineers team of Vivek Kumar Rai and Rahul Tallamraju has also been a part of the work.

What is Breast Cancer Grade ?

Cancer cells are given a grade when they are removed from the breast and checked in the lab. The grade is based on how much the cancer cells look like normal cells. The grade is used to help predict your outcome (prognosis) and to help figure out what treatments might work best.

A low grade number (grade 1) usually means the cancer is slower-growing and less likely to spread.

A high grade number (grade 3) means a faster-growing cancer that’s more likely to spread.

An intermediate grade number (grade 2) means the cancer is growing faster than a grade 1 cancer but slower than a grade 3 cancer.

In Breast Cancer Grade technique, Necrosis (areas of dead or dying cancer cells) is also noted. If there is necrosis, it means the tumor is growing quickly. The term comedo necrosis may be used if a breast duct is filled with dead and dying cells. Comedo necrosis is often linked to a high grade of DCIS and has a higher chance of developing into invasive breast cancer.

In India, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer after cervical cancer in women.  25% to 40 % of females living in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad are diagnosed with breast cancer which is more than 1/4th of all female cancers. In which almost 50% of all cases are in the age group of 15-50. It is all because of lack of awareness for breast cancer or it's late detection, inadequate treatment facilities and low coverage.

In India, according to the Globocan Data 2019, 87,090 lives are claimed by Breast Cancer every year. 

Globally, breast Cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women in 140 countries out of 184 countries. It is the second most common type of cancer in women.