Tiresias is serene

“Do not succumb to panic, these are only phantoms of your mind.”

Tibetan Budhism

Dear friends

Tiresias was considering a “back to the future” theme for today; a revisit Optiscan’s first iteration, the Stratum, for skin cancer, why it didn’t succeed, and how it will come back and, this time, will be a lead to a revolution in skin cancer. But he has decided to leave this topic, which needs a detailed exposition for another day, and instead will briefly revisit the application of artificial intelligence to Optiscan’s confocal in vivo digital biopsy.

Tiresias believes that AI, machine learning, image analysis, and visualisation combined with Optiscan's digital biopsy will do for pathology and cancer surgery, what computing has done for medical imaging. Prior to 1972 and Hounsfield and Cormack’s application of computer to plain x-rays, and the development of the CT scans, although a revolutionary development, plain x-rays were still limited. Useful for detecting broken bones, diseases of the chest, and a few other areas, but nothing like modern medical imaging. The advent of CT scanning, and then application of the same methods to magnetic resonance, ultrasound, and nuclear medicine, led to the remarkable advances we now have in medical imaging; superfast and very high resolution ubiquitous CT scanners, ultrasonography echocardiography, MRI scanning, and PET scanning. Well, the application of AI, image analysis, and visualisation and interpretation of Optiscan digital biopsy will totally transform cancer screening, cancer surgery, and cancer treatment. The ability to apply, in vivo, in the clinic, and in the operating theatre, machine learning and machine image analysis, with instantaneous computer-assisted interpretation, will finally bring to in vivo, cellular level, microimaging the revolution that has taken place in macro-imaging in the last 50 years, since Hounsfield and Cormack’s invention of the CT scanner. We are now on the threshold of a new era. Tiresias is a true believer. Tiresias does not concern himself with trivial daily fluctuations in share price. They are merely reflections of phantoms of poor trader’s minds. Tiresias is serene.