Guess, which country gets the title of ‘oral cancer capital of the world!’. It is, sadly, India. We all have seen growing up India, how common it is chew tobacco and it is the primary cause of the cancer. Sad thing is..it is 2018 and new cases have increased by 100,000.
By some estimates, two-thirds of global cases occur in low/middle income countries and India, alone has on-fifth of those & one-fourth deaths! All these deaths can be highly because of lack of access to proper/early detection.
Either in the cities, where few physicians are available or none in the remote areas. As the patients don’t experience any symptoms they wait until it is too late to seek a doctor and by then it is too late. As we have seen, with many #ProWoSo before, we need better education for prevention (don’t chew tobacco!) and easy/cheap/remote diagnostic tech to solve this #ProWoSo.
I can easily imagine a mobile phone based app can take a pic of the patient’s mouth & region and transmit (or save for later) to a nearby medical facility. A healthcare related foundation can have this app distributed to their mobile task force that reach out to remote locations. With the latest Deep Learning, AI we could even have good diagnosis done right there on the phone.
Good luck to all the Pieneers! As always, know of anyone or any startup working on this, please let me know, I will update this post.
[Image Credit: Thanks to SugarandSkullDesigns via Pixabay]
Leave a Reply