Google Develops Cancer Revealing Augmented Reality Microscope

Fighting cancer is a dirty job. Doctors and researchers can easily spend their entire careers fighting it and see slight change in the paradigm. Google has recently announced a break through technology that will assist doctors all over the world in fighting cancer.

An augmented reality (AR) based cancer revealing microscope.

“In principle, the ARM can provide a wide variety of visual feedback, including text, arrows, contours, heatmaps or animations, and is capable of running many types of machine learning algorithms aimed at solving different problems such as object detection, quantification or classification,” wrote Martin Stumpe (Technical Lead) and Craig Mermel (Product Manager) of the Google Brain Team.

Basically, this is a modified light microscope that affords real-time image analysis and presents results directly to the user. This is a major breakthrough as it gives doctors real time access to tests.

“At Google, we have also published results showing that a convolutional neural network is able to detect breast cancer metastases in lymph nodes at a level of accuracy comparable to a trained pathologist,” the Google team said in its blog post. “We believe that the ARM has potential for a large impact on global health, particularly for the diagnosis of infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and malaria, in the developing countries.”

While the technology is not perfect, it is a major leap forward for cancer research and detection. This is something that will revolutionize the battle against cancer.

I am one of the people that is hard on Google for some of the things that they develop, such as the voice recognition technology. Something like this cancer detection using augmented reality is just cool.

It will be interesting to see how this develops and how doctors are making use of it in their daily workloads. After all, if doctors cannot make use of it easily then it is no help.

Source: VR Focus