People and Perspectives
Dr Rakesh Neve
Chief Cancer Consultant
It is a well established fact that visual screening of the oral cavity helps in reduction of oral cancer mortality. Sadly, Despite the high risk of oral cancer in the Indian subcontinent, no national or regional screening programs exist. Doing such screening requires comprehensive knowledge of oral anatomy, clinical experience & expertise. Obviously this is not a scalable approach in a nation where 270 Million people consume risky forms of smoked or smokeless tobacco, and nearly 150 thousand people die of oral cancer every year. But that’s where we hope modern smartphone technology and artificial intelligence can come to the rescue.
Dr Ritwik Kulkarni
Chief Technology Officer
We set up Edgescan to solve the problem of late presentation of oral cancers. Screening for precancerous lesions and oral cancers with our tool has the potential to save more than hundred thousand lives annually in India alone, and millions more due to opportunistic tobacco cessation intervention in patients presenting with tobacco induced pre-cancerous lesions. Once delivered as an app, our tool will empower patients and their healthcare advisors from around the world to identify early signs of cancer and act in a timely manner. We will do so with world-class technology and a strong multidisciplinary team of oral health experts, onco surgeons, clinical research scientists, AI experts and software developers. To train the artificial intelligence tool, we need hundreds and thousands of well annotated images of a variety of oral lesions acquired ethically from diverse patient populations.
Dr Uma Datar
Senior Oral Cancer Expert
At Edgescan we followed good clinical practice principles to design & implement a robust clinical protocol for image acquisition. Till date, we have 18 clinical sites where the protocol has been approved by a local ethical committee and is being used for acquiring smartphone images of a diverse range of oral lesions. These sites are geographically diverse, in urban as well as rural parts of India. The principal investigators at these sites are cancer experts, thus giving us confidence in their initial diagnosis. At Edgescan we have a team of experts, who ensure that the lesions reported from clinical sites are annotated & labelled properly. The sites also send biopsy findings where relevant, to confirm diagnosis for annotation purposes. Once this quality check is done, annotated images are fed into the process for training the machine learning model.
Dr Sudhanshu Patwardhan
Founder and Managing Director
Edgescan AI and its parent company OraiBio (UK) are poised to transform early oral cancer and pre-cancer screening in India and indeed globally. What makes our model and the app through which it is delivered unique is the ease of use using a standard smartphone, scientifically validated tech, and scalability as a screening tool. As we near the granting of ISO certification for our development facilities in India and completion of the licensing process for using the tool in India as a software as a medical device, we are confident of the tool's potential reach and impact. This project is likely the most ambitious cancer screening projects in public health that shall address the healthcare needs of the most disadvantaged oral tobacco users of the Global South.