Losing a young cousin to breast cancer was a turning point for Geetha Manjunath, one that fueled her entrepreneurial drive to find a solution. Today, her conviction is clear: ‘Nobody should die from breast cancer’, if only detection comes early enough.
Dr. Geetha Manjunath is the Founder, CEO, and Chief Technology Officer of NIRAMAI Health Analytix, which has developed a groundbreaking AI technology for detecting early-stage breast cancer without the use of radiation. She holds a Ph.D. in nanotechnology from IISc and a management education degree from Kellogg Chicago. She has over 25 years of experience in IT innovation.
Over the past few years, she has proposed and led several AI projects at Xerox Research and Hewlett-Packard India. She was the Lab Director for Data Analytics at Xerox India before starting NIRAMAI. She is the founder, CEO, and CTO of NIRAMAI Health Analytix, a company that has developed a groundbreaking AI technology for early-stage breast cancer detection that does not require radiation.
How a Personal Loss Sparked a Revolution in Breast Cancer Detection?
A New Era in Breast Cancer Screening: The Promise of Niramai’s Thermalytix
How a Niramai Screening Works (Step-by-Step)
Why Is It Different from Mammography?
A Powerful Companion to Clinical Breast Exams
Accessibility & Cost Vision
Awards and Recognition
Geeta Manjunath’s Plan for Niramai: What’s Coming Next?
How a Personal Loss Sparked a Revolution in Breast Cancer Detection?
Dr. Geetha Manjunath is an experienced computer scientist with a PhD and years of experience at major tech companies like Xerox. But her real mission? Making early breast cancer detection accessible to all. That’s why she started Niramai, a Bengaluru-based startup, in 2016.
However, her career took a deeply personal turn after tragedy struck. Two of her close relatives, aged just 42 and 38, were diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and lost their lives within six months.
Witnessing the emotional, social, and financial toll of the disease compelled her to search for a better way to detect cancer early.
“I knew there had to be a better way,” Dr. Manjunath recalls. Her quest led her to combine artificial intelligence with thermal imaging to create a groundbreaking solution.
This is the true power of AI, not just “artificial intelligence,” but “augmented implementation” that can save lives.
A New Era in Breast Cancer Screening: The Promise of Niramai’s Thermalytix
Niramai is changing how (and where) women can get screened. Instead of X-rays, compression plates, and large hospital infrastructure, the company’s Thermalytix technology blends high-resolution thermal imaging with AI/ML algorithms to look for suspicious heat patterns that may indicate abnormal cell growth.
The result: a private, painless, radiation-free screening that can travel to the patient.
Thermalytix is an advanced computer-aided diagnostic platform driven by proprietary AI and machine learning algorithms. Using a high-resolution thermal sensor, it captures minute temperature variations across the chest. These thermal patterns are then securely analyzed on the cloud to identify irregularities that may signal early-stage breast cancer.
Manjunath is actively exploring new applications of her AI-powered thermal imaging platform, aiming to extend its capabilities beyond breast cancer detection to whole-body health screenings, fever detection, and the diagnosis of other diseases and abnormalities.
Pratyusha Srivastava
How a Niramai Screening Works (Step-by-Step)
- Walk-in Privacy Booth: The woman enters a screened area; no one touches or views her directly.
- Cooling Period (10 mins): She sits in an air-conditioned room (or in front of a cooler) to allow natural heat gradients to stabilize.
- Thermal Capture: A contactless thermal sensor, positioned ~3 feet away, captures images in ~5 standard postures to map the full chest region.
- AI Analysis: Thermalytix software analyses temperature variations and vascular patterns associated with abnormal metabolic activity.
- Fast Results: A preliminary report is typically ready in about 10 minutes; the whole visit often wraps up in 15 minutes.
“Nobody sees or touches the person. There’s no radiation, no pain,” says Dr. Geetha Manjunath.
Why Is It Different from Mammography?
- No X-Rays: Eliminates radiation exposure and the infrastructure needed for shielded radiology rooms.
- Repeatable: Since it’s non-ionizing, it can be done more frequently, making it useful for monitoring higher-risk women or community screening programs.
- Portable Setup: Can be deployed in health camps, clinics, or smaller hospitals, significantly widening reach.
A Powerful Companion to Clinical Breast Exams
Thermalytix isn’t meant to replace clinical judgment; it can augment self-exam and clinical breast exam (CBE) by adding an imaging-plus-AI layer that helps flag areas that warrant follow-up.
According to Manjunath, some growths can exist before a palpable lump forms, and early thermal signatures may help surface risks sooner. She has cited Niramai’s ability to pick up lesions in the 3–4 mm range under certain conditions, though confirmatory diagnostic workups remain essential.
Accessibility & Cost Vision
Manjunath has spoken about driving the price of a community screening toward INR 100 per scan, dramatically below the INR 2,500 (or more) that many women pay for a mammogram in urban diagnostic centers (actual prices vary by city and facility). Because the system is portable and can be operated by trained health workers (with remote expert review), it lowers both infrastructure and staffing barriers.
She’s also noted that the hardware costs are a fraction (1/10th–1/15th) of a full mammography unit, helping smaller hospitals and screening programs bring breast checks closer to where women live.
Avinash kumar mahato
Awards and Recognition
Geetha has earned numerous national and international accolades for her groundbreaking innovations and entrepreneurial achievements. She is a recipient of the CSI Gold Medal and the BIRAC WinER Award 2018, and was featured on the Forbes List of Top 20 Self-Made Women in 2020.
Moreover, she was honored with the Accenture Vahini Innovator of the Year Award by The Economic Times and named Women Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 by BioSpectrum India. Beyond these recognitions, Geetha holds 22 granted U.S. patents, with several more awaiting approval.
Geeta Manjunath’s Plan for Niramai: What’s Coming Next?
Niramai’s thermal-AI platform was never meant to stop breast cancer. The same non-invasive, radiation-free, portable technology that helps detect early breast lesions can, in principle, be tuned to flag other abnormal heat signatures in the body, opening doors to broader cancer screening, infection detection, and treatment monitoring.
Tackling Neglected Tropical Diseases: The River Blindness Project
Niramai participated in a research initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation exploring whether thermal imaging could help in the fight against river blindness (onchocerciasis), a parasitic disease transmitted by the bite of infected blackflies. The parasite can create nodules under the skin, trigger intense itching, and, if untreated, lead to severe, sometimes blinding, eye disease.
At the time of the interview, Niramai had completed Phase 1 of the research and was seeking approval to begin Phase 2 field testing and data collection in Ghana. Traditional detection methods require taking a skin snip and examining it under a microscope, which is painful, invasive, and hard to scale.
Dr. Geetha Manjunath believes thermal imaging could offer a non-invasive way to detect parasite activity beneath the skin and even track how well drug regimens are working over time. “If we want to develop new drugs and see if they work, scraping skin isn’t ideal. Can we monitor responses non-invasively? That’s the goal,” she explains.
Conclusion
Dr. Geetha Manjunath’s journey from a computer scientist to a healthcare innovator is truly inspiring. In addition to transforming how breast cancer is detected, she has democratized access to life-saving screenings for women who would otherwise be overlooked by conventional healthcare systems with Thermalytix.
Looking ahead, Geetha’s vision extends beyond breast cancer to a future where AI-powered thermal imaging becomes a universal tool for early disease detection, from neglected tropical diseases to whole-body health monitoring.
Arbaz Sayed
FAQs
Who is Dr. Geetha Manjunath?
Dr. Geetha Manjunath is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of NIRAMAI Health Analytix, a Bengaluru-based startup that uses AI and thermal imaging to detect breast cancer early, without radiation.
What is Niramai?
Niramai (Non-Invasive Risk Assessment with Machine Intelligence) is a startup that developed Thermalytix, a contactless, radiation-free, and private breast cancer screening technology.
Where can Niramai screenings be conducted?
Niramai screenings are designed to be mobile and accessible. They can be conducted in:
- Hospitals and diagnostic centers
- Health camps and remote clinics
- Walk-in privacy booths, where women are not touched or viewed directly
Leave a Reply