AI steps in to detect the world’s deadliest infectious disease
As a professor and computer scientist at MIT, Regina Barzilay has spent years building AI models to detect breast cancer and lung cancer. Then, when a hospital in Sri Lanka told her it couldn't afford to buy off-the-shelf AI models for TB screenings, she agreed to build one for them.As she got to work this past year, she says, she immediately understood why TB is at the vanguard of the global health challenges with AI solutions.
"You can see TB. TB is visual. You have an x-ray. You have a label which says whether they have it or not — and you just train the model," Barzilay says, adding that it only took her a few months and less than $50,000 to make her model. "It's straightforward, very cheap, very fast to develop."
