AI Tech Used to Index and Search Joint Pathology Center Archive

November 23, 2020

The US’s Joint Pathology Center is the proud collector of the world’s largest group of preserved human tissue samples. Now, with help from University of Waterloo’s KIMIA Lab in Ontario, Canada, the facility will soon be using AI to index and search its digital archive of samples. ComputerUser announces the development in, “Artificial Intelligence Search Technology Will Be Used to Help Modernize US Federal Pathology Facility.”

As happy as we are to see the emergence of effective search solutions, we are also ticked by the names KIMIA used—the image search engine is commercialized under the name Lagotto, and the image retrieval tech is dubbed Yottixel. The write-up tells us:

“Yottixel will be used to enhance biomedical research for infectious diseases and cancer, enabling easier data sharing to facilitate collaboration and medical advances. The JPC is the leading pathology reference centre for the US federal government and part of the US Defense Health Agency. In the last century, it has collected more than 55 million glass slides and 35 million tissue block samples. Its data spans every major epidemic and pandemic, and was used to sequence the Spanish flu virus of 1918. It is expected that the modernization also helps to better understand and fight the COVID-19 pandemic. … Researchers at Waterloo have obtained promising diagnostic results using their AI search technology to match digital images of tissue samples in suspected cancer cases with known cases in a database. In a paper published earlier this year, a validation project led by Kimia Lab achieved accurate diagnoses for 32 kinds of cancer in 25 organs and body parts.”

Short for the Laboratory for Knowledge Inference in Medical Image Analysis, KIMIA Lab focuses on mass image data in medical archives using machine learning schemes. Established in 2013 and hosted by the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering, the program trains students and hosts international visiting scholars.

Cynthia Murrell, November 23, 2020

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