Tiresias: There many paths to go by

“Today’s best practices lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”

Peter Thiel

My Friends,

Tiresias saw Hera’s Milky way, Venus and the constellations, and it was good. Too long an absence from connections depletes the spirit and the mind. And he is replintish’d! And he sees that digital, artificial intelligence enabled, networked, cloud-based, real time digital pathology is coming to the operating room and the clinic there is no doubt. Optiscan is the leader in the field, and the affirmation from the Mayo Clinic is the confirmation that changes everything. Up to now Optiscan has been developing the hardware and software operating system to produce images. With Mayo Clinic collaboration, with its 25,000,000 specimens for machine learning, AI enabled pathological reporting will transform the whole field of pathology.

Optiscan and digital pathology are just at the point where computing was in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with the introduction of Personal Computers. As Tiresias well recalls, at that time people were asking, “what’s it for?”; “Who needs a home computer?” IBM, the then behemoth in the field, brought out the IBM PC. And that changed everything. It was the affirmation that suddenly made the personal computer respectable and real. The name of “Big Blue” was suddenly affixed to the Personal Computer. Everybody, particularly businesses, suddenly sat up and started to take the field seriously.

Apple had already introduced its Apple 2, which was based on a different operating system and different software and set out to be a hardware and a software producer.

Microsoft sold (non-exclusively) DOS (operating system) to IBM, for the IBM PC never produced any hardware. Microsoft went on the software course only. And the rest is history.

IBM, the natural leader at the time, is now nowhere in the production of PC's, internet, or any mobile computing.

Apple has straddled both hardware and software and with a move to hardware in mobile phones, watches etc all are produced in predominantly China or other places in Asia. Apple makes a large percentage of its profits from selling hardware which Apple however does not itself manufacture. With the introduction of the iPod, Steve Jobs also took Apple to content. It has continued and is one of the leaders in network, cloud, and content.

At present Optiscan is producing, hardware has developed the operating system software for the hardware, and has developed, with Prolucid, the networking software and is developing the AI for interpretation of pathology.

Tiresias has no doubt that the really big step is combination of all of these using hardware which will have to be placed in every operating theatre, every endoscopy suite, day surgical theatre and clinic. These will all require real-time pathology reading which will need to be outsourced via the net using AI and with human backup. The question is can and should Optiscan try to do all of these. Apple has. IBM is nowhere, Microsoft has obviously thrived. Is it going to be hardware, hardware, network/AI interpretive software, or just on-line, real-time pathology reporting(content)? Can Optiscan do all of these and should Optiscan just continue making hardware. There's no doubt that this, by itself, will be a huge market. Unfortunately, Australia is not a manufacturer, and mass manufacturing, on a really mass scale will have to be outsourced.

Should Optiscan then also build both the software and hardware? In other words, should Optiscan aim to produce the full platform of hardware and the whole software system for online pathology, artificial intelligence for pathology, or should Optiscan just concentrate on content (reporting services), which will be the really huge field and one with the biggest margins. And why not all of these? It would need coordination of manufacturing, networking, software artificial intelligence and the pathology specimens to train the AI system. The Mayo Clinic has the pathological resources and expertise to enable the last step and Tiresias has no doubt that this is why Mayo has partnered with Optiscan. Tiresias will pause on this strategic question for this week’s epistles to let his friends ponder what may be.

Until next week