Google is working on a microscope that can help recognize cancer cells in human tissue through augmented reality and machine learning. The technique can be applied in existing microscopes.
Ok.. Google did not actually made the microscope… It’s an ordinary light microscope, the kind used by pathologists worldwide. Google just tweaked it a little:
The images that a researcher sees through the microscope are loaded into the computer via a camera in real time. Google’s algorithms then attempt to detect cancer cells through neural networks that have been trained to detect cancer cells in human tissue samples.
How does it work?
First, neural networks are trained to detect cancer cells in images of human tissue. Then, after a slide with human tissue is placed under the modified microscope, the same image a person sees through the scope’s eyepieces is fed into a computer. algorithms then detect cancer cells in the tissue, which the system then outlines in the image seen through the eyepieces (see image above). It’s all done in real time and works quickly enough that it’s still effective when a pathologist moves a slide to look at a new section of tissue.
I hope this is a really good breakthrough in getting rid of cancer. Keep up the good work and lets hope and pray that one day we can erradicate cancer altogether.