In Bangladesh, the incidence of breast cancer has been increasing at an alarming rate in recent years. Yet, most cancers are detected at later stages of the disease, which reduces the odds of survival. We believe that awareness, screening, risk assessment and early detection can go a long way in reducing the fatality of breast cancer.

In reality, women in Bangladesh are often uncomfortable and cannot afford to use conventional procedures for screening such as mammograms. In developed countries, along with screening, the use of questionnaire-based risk assessment models is prevalent. These models are used to identify those that will benefit from early preventive measures, thus reducing the fatality of breast cancer. However, such models have not been used in Bangladesh. Our preliminary research also suggested that Western models are unsuitable for Bangladesh since the demography, risk factors, and culture of the country are different.

Therefore, for the past year, our team at CanAware has been working to develop a new framework for questionnaire-based risk assessment and early detection of breast cancer for the Bangladeshi population. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever system in Bangladesh that aims to categorize the risk of breast cancer of a person through a non-invasive questionnaire-based model, and it is particularly designed to consider the needs of the Bangladeshi population.

Our framework asks questions related to personal risk factors (PRF), family history of breast cancer (FRF), and common early symptoms of breast cancer (BSA). From these inputs, we get a risk score for each of the categories, which are then merged to give the final result. The final risk scale is on a scale of 0-4 and consists of five categories - Very high (4), High (3), Moderate (2), Low (1), and Very low (0), according to which specific recommendations are given. Our model takes into account the low health literacy, culture and demography of the country.