“It's so much easier to be enthusiastic - especially when there...

“It's so much easier to be enthusiastic - especially when there are grounds for it.”

Malcolm Forbes

My friends,

To his surprise, and perhaps to the surprise of his friends, Tiresias has realized that he has greatly understated in his recent epistles. He had fully appreciated the importance and the potential magnitude of the collaboration between Optiscan and the Mayo Clinic.Tiresias has now learned that he has fallen slightly behind the developments at his alma mater of Rochester Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic. He had kept some social contact, but not kept abreast of the latest work there in the field that has interested him. An egregious oversight. He should have known better. He has, however, done some research and contacted some old mates about the developments in digital pathology, robotic surgery, machine learning, autonomous and semi-autonomous robotics and the role of. computer vision in robotic surgery, at The Clinic. In the development of robotic surgery. Tiresias only now realizes just how far The Mayo Clinic has gone in the development of robotic surgery and digital pathology and how much it leads the world in these areas. The Mayo Clinic has the largest number of Pathological slide digitizing scanners of any similar institution, and by orders of magnitude. Up to August last year, they had digitized 25million pathology slides from its library of pathology and are aiming to digitize the entire Mayo Clinic pathology library. It is clear what this is for. It is to provide a massive database for machine learning of digital pathology and to bring pathology into the digital age. This database will be the source for neural networks/machine learning and AI/AI-assisted pathology.That, in itself, is huge. Mayo’s need for Optiscan’s digital confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE) enabling real-time in-vivo digital histopathology, for not only intraoperative surgical pathology, but real-time telepathology, enabling Mayo to potentially capture the world’s digital histopathology.Tiresias almost feels sorry for the plodding old Carl Zeiss and teutonic tortoise pace.

The second area in which the developments have been far ahead of what Tiresias had thought, is robotic surgery, and the development of semi-autonomous and autonomous robot surgery, to perform accurate surgery, virtually impossible with current technology. What was needed is aseeing-eye microscopefor the robot to see and be computer guided at a cellular level, first for cancer surgery, but then for much finer surgery, which at present cannot be even contemplated.

In addition to these revelations, perhaps justen passant, Tiresias has learned that the Mayo Clinic has its MedTech company, Mayo Medical Ventures.Tiresias’s imaginations of the possible implications of this for Optiscan are manifold. But there is still more. Mayo Clinic has a dedicated department to deal with the FDA, specifically for regulatory and compliance digital pathology and robotic surgery, AI application to surgery and pathology. Tiresias will leave his friends to meditate on these matters and how that affects us.

Now, my friends, on matters of some pecuniary and down to earth interest. We have had a nice little rise in our price through June. Tiresias has been musing or cogitating or perhaps dreaming as to how one might price our current position. What is the current expected value of this disruptive technology. Tiresias has long studied and mused over the various stock pricing models. He's well versed in the writings of Benjamin Graham. and his acolytes, like Warren Buffett. Tiresias is “full bottle” on portfolio theory. He has even wondered randomly down Wall Street. Ultimately none of these are applicable to what we have with Optiscan, right now. This has to be thought of as a disruptive medical technology which is potentially going to revolutionize not just pathology through its ability to provide real time in vivo digital pathology but will revolutionize surgery by providing computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning, semi-autonomous and autonomous robotic surgery. You can bet Mayo Medical Ventures have more than mused on this.

Until next week.