After Cousin’s Diagnosis, Researcher Builds Non-Invasive Device to Detect Breast Cancer

21 Dec 2022

In 2016, Geetha Manjunath had a terrific career heading the Data Analytics Research Laboratory in Xerox Research Centre India (XRCI). And then, one phone call changed her life. Her cousin, all of 42, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. As the diagnosis was done very late, she didn’t survive. “I was devastated,” she recalls. Working in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Bengaluru resident decided to quit her job and find a tech-based solution to detect breast cancer early. “The mammogram had missed her cancer earlier,” she tells The Better India.  “So I wanted to develop a tool that could help detect it early, even in women below 45, as mammograms are often unable to detect cancer in younger women.”“As I was working with multiple image modalities for other projects at Xerox, I chanced upon thermal imaging.”