Tiresias: Roadmap Part

"Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future; faith is the ability to dance to it today."

Peter Kuzmic

My friends,

Tiresias has discussed many aspects of Optiscan in his posts. He has iterated and reiterated some subjects. He hopes that you, my friends, are still with him, for there is much besides, he still has to cover. It pleases Tiresias to cover these things, but it is as important to visit and revisit the themes and the topics already discussed, which he believes are vital to understand as to what and where Optiscan is now, where and to what, it is headed.

Optiscan has been listed and has floundered in the market for some time. As Tiresias has previously said, for a new technology to succeed, the technology must be right, the timing must be right, and probably most importantly the management must be right. Tiresias has no doubt that the two things have held Optiscan back, until now, were the perennial shortage of funds and its unfortunate previous managements not understanding what they had and not understanding how to go about commercialising it. It is important to state, and reiterate; again Optiscan has a revolutionary technology which will transform pathology. Digitalisation is coming into everything. Medicine, by its nature is conservative and changing medicine and introducing new practice is not like bringing a new brighter coloured telephone to market. Not only has it to be right about Technology, but it must be introduced in the right way.

Just to digress for a moment and use the example of radiology. Tiresias, for much of his medical career, viewed X-Ray and Scan photographic film, supplied by Kodak et al, mounted by junior doctors, whose job it was to place the films on massive rotating boards, so that he and his radiologist colleagues could view them in a darkened room in the radiology departments. All that has gone. Now he and everyone, including the patients, can view them on their mobile phones anywhere in the world. He can have radiologists discuss them and can obtain an opinion by experts anywhere in the world. Now, also, artificial intelligence is just being introduced into stroke management, because waiting for radiologist’s report is a delay in a situation where time is brain cell death.

Pathology is still hasn’t changed much since the 19^th century. Frozen section biopsy, where Optiscan will make it’s first impact, hasn’t changed at all, since, 120 years ago, Wilson and Charlie Mayo took a specimen out of the operating theatre, into the freezing Minnesota winter air, for it to freeze, and then looked at it under a microscope on his desk. About the only thing that has changed is that the microscope has an electric light. Pathology is still a lonesome pursuit, of introverted isolated individuals, sitting in a darkened room looking down an eyepiece of a microscope. Van Leeuwenhoek would be immediately familiar, and Carl Zeiss, the man himself, would find nothing that he would surprise him. The optics are somewhat improved, and there are a few new dyes ,but it still relies on people looking down a microscope at the glass slide stained with dyes mostly invented in the 19 century. Optiscan digital in vivo confocal (three-dimensional) laser microscope (CLE)offers real-time, digital, local and remote, Internet based, artificial intelligence assisted and eventually interpreted histopathology for the operating room and the clinic.

So, why has it taken 20 years to get to this stage. The answer is obvious and is understood and is being addressed. The timing is now right. The money is available. The management is changing. The management now understands where the future is. Some of Tiresias’s shareholder friends in the market are hung up on FDA approval. Remember, the CONVIVO has FDA approval and also CE Mark. The G-I has FDA and CE mark. Tiresias is sang-froid about the FDA. The FDA is a creature of the Washington swamp, a massive bureaucracy, deeply flawed, deeply ignorant and highly politicised. It has a reputation, and it has the power to delay, and these are its only powers, powers which it exercises constantly and unjustified by its relevance. We in Australia and our TGA is in awe of the FDA. But, “the times they are a changin”. The American medical technology market is obviously important and to access it unfortunately, Optus needs to go through the FDA’s hoops. But there are other markets, bigger markets, available and ripe. The new management would understand this. What Tiresias is talking of, in the first instance, is Asia. And, there other potential collaborators, in other the fields, besides Carl Zeiss. As Tiresias has often said, Carl Zeiss is a lumbering to Teutonic giant which is pursuing neurosurgical in vivo real-time pathology in the theatre to finally make a difference in treatment of malignant brain tumour. This is very important. It has been the beacon on the hill, for shareholders like Tiresias. But there are much bigger fish to fry, and they will be netted. Optiscan and Tiresias look to skin, GI, ENT, breast, cervix, bladder, in the theatre and in the clinic, just for starters. Tiresias looks to artificial intelligence, image enhancement and improvement in the CLE technology, and removal of the glass slides like the disappearance of the Kodak films from radiology. He looks to real time pathology, and instant availability of expert and AI diagnosis at all times, anywhere in the world. And Tiresias dances to the music of the future.