Google and the US Department of Defense teamed up to battle cancer
The Department of Defense has teamed up with Google to build an AI-powered microscope that can help doctors identify cancer for service members and veterans. The tool, called the Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM), is deployed at military treatment facilities around the world.
About the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a United States Department of Defense organization founded to accelerate the adoption of commercial technologies for the U.S. military, teamed up with Google to build an AI-powered microscope to aid in cancer detection for service members and veterans. The tool, called the Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM), is deployed at military treatment facilities around the world.
The ARM utilizes artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze digitized tissue samples and highlight potential abnormalities to help pathologists find cancer fast and with better accuracy. In the future, ARM can be trained to recognize other diseases and ultimately help develop, educate, and research the study and diagnosis of diseases.
The Veterans Affairs Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness, and Safety recently reported that within the United States, an estimated 5% of outpatient diagnoses are conducted in error. This translates to misdiagnosis of 12 million patients each year.* At the same time, the Defense Health Agency spends approximately $1.7 billion of its annual budget on cancer research, and that figure continues to grow.
The goal of the DIU-Google Cloud project is to help improve the accuracy of diagnoses, assisting physicians who face an overwhelming volume of data when making diagnostic and treatment decisions--and to help lower overall healthcare costs. In collaboration with DIU, Google Cloud is developing a prototype augmented reality microscope that provides AI-powered pathology-based cancer detection tools to military treatment facilities worldwide.
The Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM), when paired with the models, uses a high-resolution camera and augmented reality display to cast an inference around pathology specimens it detects abnormalities in.
The rollout took place at select Defense Health Agency treatment facilities and Veteran’s Affairs hospitals in the United States, with future plans to expand across the broader U.S. Military Health System. The AI-based models used to assist doctors as part of the prototype were developed from public and private datasets that were de-identified to remove personal health information and any personally identifiable information. All patient diagnostic data will solely be managed by the individual hospital or provider.
“Cutting-edge technology, through collaboration between public-private partners, brings significant positive disruption at scale, ensuring reliable, time-efficient, cost-effective diagnostic care for our active service members, veterans and public at large,” said Dr. Nadeem Zafar, VA Puget Sound Health Care System Director for Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Service.
* https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/23/9/727.full?sid=34b34ada-6159-4568-8b97-3a77d3db27ad
Results combining estimates from the three studies yielded a rate of outpatient diagnostic errors of 5.08%, or approximately 12 million US adults every year. Based upon previous work, we estimate that about half of these errors could potentially be harmful.
Cloud Next: How Google and the US Department of Defense teamed up to battle cancer
Learn more about how the DoD is using AI at the edge to improve cancer detection for service members and veterans.
