2024-03-06 12:09:51
The healthcare sector has always been a major influencer in the developpment of new technologies. However, sometimes the development can be created from other, unrealated and unexpected, places.
The year is 2021, although it has been 3 years since this shocking development, not many people are aware of this. For some years the japanese bakeries have been having problems with the identification of products. The japanese population do not appretiate the use of already packaged products, so the bakeries, which have a great variaty of products (sometimes more than 100), had to identify one product at a time. Thus, a japanese company called Brain Co. took on the job to create a solution and BakeryScan was created. Through the use of a backlight the ““chromatic dispersion” can be analyzed “to permit definitive extraction of contour lines even where the pastry is of such hole-containing shape.””
At first glance it would seem that BakeryScan has nothing to do with the healthcare system and technology, however a Doctor in Kyoto thought otherwise. Influenced by BakeryScan’s advertisement, this Doctor realised that the images used by the equipement to analyse the pastries were very similar to the cells he was studying, thus he decided to contact Brain Co. to try to use the equipement to detect cancer cells.
Through many modifications to the equipment, a new machine came into existance the Cyto-AIscan. The equipment is able to do “whole-slide analysis” which looks at all of the cells in the microscope slide at once (Somers, 2021). The program assesses various markers of a cancerous cell, such as an enlarged nucleus or the cell’s morphology (Somers, 2021)”. This technology is quite important for doctors because previously detecting cancer cells was an arduous job and might have some human error involved. The new technology is not perfect, however with a 99% accuracy rate in some types of cancer detection, the machine was able to change medicine.
The image analysis AI used in BakeryScan and Cyto-aiscan was then implemented in many other departments: “distinguish pills in hospitals, to count the number of people in an eighteenth-century ukiyo-e woodblock print, and to label the charms and amulets for sale in shrines.”
This shows that technology is not limited by area, sometimes the new medicine can come from places not expected by scientists and researches. Research and development for the healthcare system will benefit greatly from interdisciplinary groups and information sharing.
Sources:
1709732023
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