Anuhya Abhiram, a student at BVRIT Hyderabad College of Engineering for Women, recently participated in a hackathon, where she leveraged IBM Watson tools to detect the level of malaria infection in a patient by studying the structure and shape of skin cells. Malaria remains one of the world’s biggest killer diseases and nearly half the population is at risk.

“The domain we chose was healthcare. We used IBM Watson Studio and a service called Visual Recognition, which is a part of IBM Watson to devise a solution. The first step was classifying the images which we had to use as the data set. Once classified, we had around 28,000 images, which would have made training a tedious task. With IBM Watson studio, the training was much quicker, and it helped us predict accurate results,” she says.

Anuhya says that being able to predict the onset of the disease can lead to timely intervention and medication, thereby ensuring higher survival rates.

Anuhya plans to take this solution to a larger audience. “We also have lots of data regarding confirmed cases of malaria throughout the world. So, using this data, we can also do predictive analysis of malaria cases each year going forward. Based on this, the healthcare sector can take prior precautions to avoid all of these problems. And IBM Watson Studio has been very helpful in helping us achieve this.”

Hear about Anuhya’s experience in her own words here.