Computer Vision News - September 2020

Paige 13 together. That runs multiple times on tens of thousands of images and their labels. Not all of the slides show cancer, but the system is able to decide which do, and which cases are purely benign. It runs until the system feels comfortable knowing where the plastic cancer is in the X number of slides it has identified. These systems have been created to find and classify disease in the same way as a pathologist, but they can do so much more. If it is known which cancers are driven by which genomic mutations , once the system understands the range of cancers, it can use transfer learning and finetuning to further sub-classify with things that pathologists cannot see. What genomic mutation is driving this cancer? Which cancers are most likely to progress? A much bigger question is: What will become of Paige if we suddenly find a cure for cancer? “It will be great because then more people will screen for cancer and one of the simplest ways to improve outcomes for cancer is finding it early,” Carla points out. “Youhave tobe really goodat finding cancer when it is tiny. In some of our studies, we have found cancers that were just a few cells that pathologists missed . In one study, we found four patients with cancer that three pathologists had missed because it can be so hard to find the tiniest cancers. They would probably have been found years later but have been much more advanced.” Different cancers can be sneaky in different ways. Carla explains that prostate cancer can be tiny and it doesn’t form tumors that you can feel or see on imaging. Liver and brain cancer patients do not exhibit symptoms until the cancer is very advanced. Some rare cancers mimic inflammation or might look like other diseases. One cancer prognosis that has seen positive changes in the last few years is that of lung cancer . The NIH ran a huge study that showed it could be caught much earlier if high-risk people like smokers, those with genetic conditions, and those who work with certain chemicals got regular screenings . There are also dozens of targeted therapies for different lung cancers that have been shown to work. 10 years ago, lung cancer was a death sentence; now, if found early, it really is not. Moving back to talking about the commercial side of the business, Carla reveals that Paige has two sets of customers: clinical customers and life science customers. “Who are our customers?” she smiles. “That is actually my favorite question because in healthcare you have many