“The U.S. military has a long history of being the greatest fighting force in the world, but it’s also been quite adept at advancing medicine in ways that have improved battlefield survivability and the health of all people. Among these breakthroughs are mass vaccinations, blood transfusions, blood banking, and the widespread use of electronic health records.”
“Now, the Department of Defense is set to take the lead on another critical medical innovation: leveraging artificial intelligence capabilities to more quickly and accurately diagnose cancer.”
“This month, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s Warfighter Health Mission Initiative, in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), deployed the DoD’s first-ever augmented reality microscope (ARM) loaded with AI algorithms that can detect metastatic breast cancer cells on digital images. This first device will be used by pathologists at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) in San Antonio, Tex., and additional microscopes will be deployed to military treatment facilities (MTFs) all over the world.”
“This project, known as Predictive Health, will develop AI applications that improve readiness and save lives.”
“’This is not an abstract thing,’ stated U.S. Navy Capt. (Dr.) Hassan Tetteh, Warfighter Health Mission Chief. ‘What we are doing with these augmented reality microscopes is delivering AI capability at the point of care. We’ve leveraged computer vision that’s built into the device that can examine the samples and identify the abnormal cancer cells by drawing rings around them even before the pathologist looks at it.’”
“The AI capability within the microscopes is critical to not just identifying cancer but also prioritizing cases, optimizing workflow, and decreasing the amount of time it takes to get a patient definitively diagnosed and into treatment…” Read the full press release here.
Source: JAIC, in partnership with DIU, Delivering AI-Enabled Cancer Diagnostics at the Point of Care – October 21, 2020. JAIC.
