Screening of diseases using a microscope can be time consuming and limiting on the number of patients to be worked on, it is again on this background that Makerere University College of computing and information Sciences is exploring the use of artificial intelligence to automate disease screening.
Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines perform tasks, like in humans the diseases selected to be screened using this technology are malaria, cancer and tuberculosis.
Artificial intelligence is able to tell you I’ve seen this number of parasites, I’ve seen this kind of pathology , I’ve seen this bacteria TB or anything and at one point one has to know how many of them has the system been able to recognize such that we can increase your confidence levels.
Dr Rose Nakazi from Makara University College of computing and information Sciences explains how the technology works . so our position was if we can be able to attach a smartphone onto the microscope then we can be able to capture images through the smartphone and then analyze them through the smart phone, so the idea was that we should be able to develop a 3D printable adapter that we attach on the eyepiece of the microscope to support the attachment of this Smartphone onto the microscope.
It is believed that the technology will increase on the number of patients screened daily at Health Facilities but also improve accuracy up to 80 percent. It’s going to improve the number by almost 25 percent but as well as improve diagnosis by up to 80 percent of what the conversion microscopy has been doing.
It is going to shorten the time and it is going to improve on the overall turn around and even if you’re the only one working. And this is when this technology comes in handy all you have is to first prepare the slide and stain it, put under the microscope take an image and the system is able to rotate and tell you if the slide has the parasites you are looking for or the bacteria or the cancer you are looking for or not.
The permanent secretary in the ministry of ICT and National guidance, Dr Amina zawede lauded Makerere University for innovating solutions that possibly impact Society services , for us to operate effectively and efficiently we have to take services online. The system that we are launching today is one of the services. This will improve on transparency, accountability, efficiency and offcourse at the end of the day, will create impact by improving people’s lives . Makerere University is furthering research on automated screening of diseases using artificial intelligence with support from Google of US Dollars 1.5 million approximately 55.5 billion Uganda Shillings for the University.
