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.
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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.
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