Prithi Chakrapani, a third-year medical student in the Norton College of Medicine at Upstate Medical University, is a semifinalist in the prestigious American Medical Association Research Challenge.

Chakrapani’s research abstract—Utilizing Neural Networks for Follicular Lymphoma Grading on Whole Slide Imaging—is one of only 50 selected for the research challenge, which is the largest national, multi-specialty research conference for medical students, residents, fellows, and international medical graduates to showcase and present research.

She will attend the AMA Research Challenge semifinals Nov. 8 in Florida where her research will be scored for consideration to advance in the AMA Research Challenge finals in February.

“I’m honored to represent Upstate at the AMA Research Challenge,” Chakrapani said. “My passion for engineering and desire to contribute to integrating artificial intelligence into medicine inspired me to pursue this project. Starting medical school with an engineering background, I became aware of several areas in medicine that could benefit from greater efficiency through AI. This realization motivated me to focus on using these technologies to address challenges in the field.”

Chakrapani’s research is aimed at improving grading accuracy for follicular lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, by using artificial intelligence (AI) to support pathologists in analyzing tissue samples.  The team developed an AI model to make the grading process—often highly variable—more consistent and efficient.

Using more than 1,000 patient tissue images, Chakrapani and her research team trained a neural network to classify samples into three grades of cancer severity. They used a method that analyzes small sections (tiles) of each image and combined the data for a final grade. The model achieved 85 percent accuracy, which they say is better than most human pathologists.

This AI tool could serve as a preliminary grading aid for pathologists, helping reduce workload and improve accuracy in high-volume settings, her team said.

Chakrapani said Upstate has been very supportive or her work, especially Sherrie Hale, PhD; Michaela Kollisch-Singule, MD; Matthew Mason, MD and Debra Purdy.

“I have appreciated that faculty at Upstate are so responsive and eager to help,” Chakrapani said.  “The mentors who I have turned to have been extremely helpful in supporting my idea, even if it's not their area of expertise, and have helped to connect me with people who would be able to help me merge my two interests.”

Caption: Prithi Chakrapani, a third-year medical student in Upstate's Norton College of Medicine, is a semifinalist in the national American Medical Association Research Challenge