AI tech detecting disease in blood

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Queensland scientists are using artificial intelligence to detect diseases under a microscope. The technology has been 10 years in the making and could be a game changer.

Transcript

00:00 The system's been developed over 10 years and it is now doing 17 different tests and

00:10 that will soon increase. So our aim is to use the, replace the glass microscope slides

00:17 with computer imaging.

00:19 Right, okay, so you program a computer?

00:22 Yes, what we've built is an intelligent scanner and the scanner knows what it's looking for

00:28 when it does the scanning and it produces a very high quality image at multi-resolutions

00:35 like Google Earth and then the diagnosis is done on that image rather than on the glass

00:42 slide.

00:43 Right, so the computer does the diagnosis as well, but you're not taking out humans

00:48 completely from the process?

00:51 Everything is signed off by a human. What we do is when we scan we also preview the

00:55 slide and find out the important bits of the slide and so when the pathologist or the scientist

01:00 looks at the slide they are told which parts of the slide are most relevant.

01:06 Okay, interesting. So what does it do for the speed and the size of the samples being

01:11 processed?

01:14 It is fast and of course it's scalable because it's fully automated. So they've got four

01:18 scanning machines now that process all their samples overnight and the diagnosis is much

01:25 faster. It might go from 15 minutes down to 20, 30 seconds.

01:29 Is there a margin for error or is there no error?

01:32 The pathologists do exactly what they did before, but it's like having a junior pathologist

01:36 look at it first and then tell the senior pathologist what they think is wrong and where

01:41 the problems are.

01:42 I was interested to read that not much has changed in the field of microscopy since the

01:46 1800s. Why has that been and therefore this is such an enormous leap?

01:52 Yes, the idea of looking through microscopes to find germs was what Louis Pasteur did in

01:58 the 1800s and he developed the germ theory of disease which is totally accepted now.

02:03 Before then they thought that bad air, smelly air made people sick. So he developed the

02:10 whole field of pathology and it's still people looking through slides at germs.

02:15 Is it just blood?

02:16 No.

02:17 Okay, what else?

02:18 No, it's everything. Everything that goes through a path lab in a microscope we can

02:23 put through our system.

02:25 One final question because it's what people will be saying, "Oh, here we go again. Robots

02:29 taking our jobs."

02:32 We haven't seen that. There's a massive shortage of skills in the pathology industry. A lot

02:39 of the pathologists are quite old and they are getting older, but people are getting

02:43 sicker and they're living longer and so there's more and more demand for pathology. So one

02:47 thing it's doing is addressing the skills shortage.

02:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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