Publications by authors named "Zac Mtema"

Article Synopsis
  • - Cervical cancer remains a leading cause of death among women globally, making early screening for its precursors, particularly Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia (CIN), crucial for improving survival rates.
  • - Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) is a common method for detecting cervical lesions but relies heavily on the subjective assessment of health workers, which can vary in quality.
  • - A new deep learning algorithm called Automated Visual Evaluation (AVE) can analyze cervigrams more accurately than human experts and, when combined with image quality assessment tools, has shown promising results on low-end smartphones for efficient cervical cancer screening.
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Purpose: Until human papillomavirus (HPV)-based cervical screening is more affordable and widely available, visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) is recommended by the WHO for screening in lower-resource settings. Visual inspection will still be required to assess the cervix for women whose screening is positive for high-risk HPV. However, the quality of VIA can vary widely, and it is difficult to maintain a well-trained cadre of providers.

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Automated Visual Examination (AVE) is a deep learning algorithm that aims to improve the effectiveness of cervical precancer screening, particularly in low- and medium-resource regions. It was trained on data from a large longitudinal study conducted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and has been shown to accurately identify cervices with early stages of cervical neoplasia for clinical evaluation and treatment. The algorithm processes images of the uterine cervix taken with a digital camera and alerts the user if the woman is a candidate for further evaluation.

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