Tiresias: On micro movies

“Please forgive my long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

Blaise Pascal

My friends,

Of late, Tiresias has again tended to get overlong in his epistles. He will endeavour to be briefer, but he confesses, he tends to get too excited and wax over-lyrical. Still an “Excitable (Old) Boy”. Though there lots to comment on, present and future, let’s see if Tiresias can be mindful of Pascal’s admonition.

First, of course the share price is the share-price. Of course, nobody, including Tiresias, likes a low share-price. Most of this price action in OIL is beyond Optiscan. Tiresias does not need to dwell on world situations, inflation, rising interest-rates, threatening recessions, talk of stagflation, breakdown on the supply side, war, and rumours of World War III. It is not surprising that markets are in turmoil! The major Indices: the Dow Jones, the S&P 50, the All Ords, Bitcoin, Gold, and the rest, are taking a hammering. These major Indices however understate the real devastation in the small caps, around the world. Optiscan’s share price is not immune to all this and of course it is not helped, at this time of the year, by the Tax loss selling, or the waiting for news or announcements from the company on progress. Tiresias however remains focussed on what the real Optiscan game is and remains. In this vein, will comment, further on a landmark paper, just published, and just posted on HC, by our friend, gmutton. This truly landmark publication shows a new approach to Optiscan’s Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy. To be completely truthful, though Tiresias has been looking at this technology for some 20 years, he had not really considered that it would be such an important advance. Just this reading the abstract, one may not fully appreciate the full significance, and one may miss the point. At first glance it seems to just highlight the feasibility tele-histopathology, using a Telly Software Platform (TSP), to improve simultaneous remote viewing, by many pathologists locally in the hospital, at home and the other side of the world, of the CONVIVO intraoperative CLE images. And it does that. And that’s very important. However, and what is really exciting, it that enables video flow imaging. This is a microscopic real-time movie enabling continuous optical biopsy, without having to take tissue, to be examined in conjunction with the surgeon in the operating room, by pathologist or pathologists outside the theatre, elsewhere in the hospital, at home, or on the opposite side of the world. This paper from Barrow Institute details neurosurgery and laser endomicroscopy on patients with brain tumours, whilst 11 pathologists, in different parts of the hospital, some at home and some in another state, are looking in on the video microscopy. All this live, as the surgeon is operating, and with the pathologists viewing and commenting and interacting with the surgeon. Tiresias had not imagined how much this video flow technique improves the CLE accuracy, and how much it overcomes the previous limitations, such as the issue of blood flow affecting image quality. In very short optical biopsy time, the speed was dramatically improved, to a matter of seconds, and overall diagnostic accuracy to an unimagined 96%. There is a lot more in this paper too, but, to keep in the good books of his hero, Blaise Pascal, Tiresias will leave this to a future time

Tiresias keeps faith.