Akshita Sachdeva was just eight years old when her grandmother died of cancer, but the event, she says, left a mark on her. She grew up hearing her grandfather say that if there had been a physician in the family, maybe his wife wouldn’t have died from the disease.
Motivated by her personal experience, Sachdeva entered the medical device startup space. Now, she is developing an inexpensive, portable way to bring cervical cancer screening to rural communities. Looking for support for her venture, she applied to the 2020 MedTechnovation challenge from the Dayananda Sagar Entrepreneurship Research & Business Incubation Foundation (DERBI Foundation), which partnered with MathWorks for the challenge.
Equity in Cancer Screening
萨克德娃（Sachdeva）打算成为祖父希望的医生，在11年级和12年级上参加了医学课。但是她的一位教授向萨克德娃（Sachdeva）表明，可能还有其他方法可以帮助患有癌症的人。“她说，这并不总是关于有一位好医生的。这也与诊断出癌症的阶段有关。” Sachdeva说。
That inspired her to pivot her focus. She decided to build tools to help both patients and healthcare workers. As a computer science and engineering undergraduate student, she first focused on projects to help people with visual impairments. Later, she applied her technical skills to techniques to analyze cervical images for signs of disease.
Cervisense uses machine learning to help automate and enhance the accuracy of cervical cancer screening.
窥镜安装的宫颈设备连接到宫颈平板电脑应用程序。（图片来源：Akshita Sachdeva）
After graduating from college, Sachdeva wanted to expand her school projects for real-world use. Her first business venture,栈桥实验室, has brought assistive technology to over 45,000 people with visual impairments or blindness across seven countries. The product, Kibo, digitizes and reads written content aloud to users. “With that success, I felt it was the right time for me to start out with my next venture, Satin, in the cancer space,” says Sachdeva.
SATIN HealthTech始于Sachdeva会见她的业务伙伴Bonny Dave时。她说：“我们俩都有相同的愿景。”
戴夫还想开发癌症筛查和诊断工具。与Sachdeva不同，他的动机来自生存故事。他的祖母接受了乳腺癌的诊断，但幸运的是，在早期。医生在癌症扩散之前去除病态的组织。
萨克德娃说：“这些事件促使我们开始缎面。”受到祖母的启发，她和戴夫创立了Satin Healthtech, naming the company by combining their grandmothers’ names, Satya and Indu.
Their product, Cervisense, comprises a small camera mounted on a speculum and a tablet-based program that delivers on-the-spot cervical cancer screening results. “It’s an optical imaging-based screening tool that helps automate and enhance the accuracy of cervical cancer screening. The program applies machine learning techniques on the images,” Sachdeva says.
借助Cervisense，医疗保健工作者在检查期间为患者的子宫颈拍照，并通过平板电脑运行的程序来喂养这些医学级图像。图像处理算法输出的分数为医疗保健工作者提供了初步诊断，以指导他们的护理建议。Sachdeva说：“它还为妇科医生提供了热图，以便可以标记活检站点。”
缎的时机很好:缎后几个月Healthtech was founded, the World Health Organization announced the Global Strategy for Cervical Cancer Elimination calling for higher screening rates.
Early Cancer Detection Is Key
宫颈癌早期被捕时可以治愈，但早期诊断取决于常规筛查。在农村地区，尤其是在低收入国家和中等收入国家中，很少有人能够获得这一护理。解决这个问题至关重要，因为这些领域的人解释了85% of cervical cancer cases.
“In India especially, cervical cancer generally affects rural women,” says Sachdeva. “The only screening techniques most healthcare workers use involve applying chemicals to the cervix and looking at the cervix with the naked eye for any color changes. The color changes indicate whether cancer is present.”
“我申请了Medtechnovation挑战，以获得正确的指导，合适的团队以及正确的资源，将其提升到一个新的水平。”
Satin Healthtech的联合创始人Akshita Sachdeva
Some organizations bring Pap tests, a routine screening method in high-income countries, to rural communities. But healthcare workers may not be able to provide the test results for a week. Far too often, the women don’t return to collect their results.
Sachdeva说：“我意识到有必要在提高准确性的同时自动化筛选过程。”“这就是为什么我申请Medtechnovation挑战，以获取正确的指导，合适的团队以及正确的资源将其提升到一个新的水平。”
印度宫颈癌筛查的区域差异。东部和东北地区的农村地区的筛查率最低。（数据来源：CDC发病率和死亡率每周报告，2019年1月11日）
Screening for Cancer with Image Processing
Sachdeva entered the MedTechnovation challenge hoping to advance her cervical cancer screening technology and pursue clinical testing. “I was reading about different incubation programs supporting ventures in the healthcare space. That’s when I learned about the DERBI Foundation program,” says Sachdeva.
“[Cervisense] can have a strong impact, especially in India and other low- and middle-income countries.”
Satin Healthtech的联合创始人Akshita Sachdeva
“The program was about identifying and supporting early-stage innovators in healthcare who are building tech solutions to solve India’s healthcare problems,” says Lakshmi Jagannathan, chief executive officer of DERBI.
在100多名申请人中，法官选择了11家初创企业，以在德比人获得赠款，孵化以及Mathworks Accelerator计划的技术支持。万博1manbetx从这些初创公司中，Mathworks选择了Sachdeva的Satin Healthtech参加新的技术指导计划。
“One of the biggest challenges for any startup is to get solid technology support, build a solution, and scale it up,” says Jagannathan. “The startup ecosystem is a race to excel and do better than your competitors.” Through MedTechnovation and the partnership with MathWorks, DERBI is providing that support to Sachdeva’s startup.
Mathworks指导计划是Sachdeva进入挑战的关键原因。她熟悉其他孵化器，其中指导是一件令人不快的事情。她说：“我从过去的冒险中意识到的是，这就是拥有合适的团队和正确的指导。”“技术指导计划和MATLAB®有helped me build the right algorithm,” says Sachdeva.
Akshita Sachdeva与Mathworks技术导师会面。
When Sachdeva entered the MedTechnovation challenge, she was not satisfied with her screening algorithm’s accuracy in flagging abnormal cervical images. Part of the problem was her training data set. Sachdeva used a publicly available database of cervical images to train her algorithm, but these images were tricky to work with. “With this data set, other people achieved a similar accuracy level,” she says.
The mentorship program helped her work with those limitations. “My mentor showed me how to change different parameters to achieve higher accuracy with my deep learning network,” says Sachdeva.
Sachdeva还与其他组织合作，获得改进的数据集，以进一步增强其算法。她预计宫颈森斯将在接下来的几个月内准备好进行临床测试。
Satin Healthtech已完成其宫颈原型，他们已经对印度的妇科医生和肿瘤学家感兴趣。Sachdeva说：“他们对宫颈的兴趣对妇女的生活产生积极影响。”
By next year, she hopes Cervisense can be part of larger cervical cancer eradication initiatives. “The whole idea is to implement my solution with the initiatives in progress, like the WHO strategy,” says Sachdeva. “It can have a strong impact, especially in India and other low- and middle-income countries.”
