Did you know that both in the USA and Armenia cancer is considered to be second death cause. In Armenia it is 19%. This fact was presented during seminar “Revolutionizing cancer Treatment: Harnessing AI for Biomedical imaging” by Aleksandr Sarachakov, Biomedical Imaging Team Lead at BostonGene Armenia.

During seminar I learned that:

1.    Medical centers stain thousands of tissue images each day, which places a significant burden on physicians. This necessitates the automation of the analysis process. At the same time there is always subjectivity in pathologist work. Here that AI neural networks can help, particularly automation through neural networks helps eliminate human subjectivity, improve result reproductivity and reduce analysis time delivering accurate and faster outcomes for clinical diagnostics. Also, AI can detect microscopic changes that may be overlooked by a physician, especially when dealing large volumes of data.

2.    Application of AI in medicine started in 2015 with the emergence of the UNet architecture, which revolutionized the application of AI in medicine. But AI in biomedicine is still applied relatively infrequently.

3.    Currently in practice a multitude of challenges are encountered.

• A lot of data is needed. 99 percent of data in digital pathology are unlabeled,
• Pathologists do not agree with each other,
• Slides are enormous,
• It is very computationally expensive such huge slides.

4.    Aleksandr also explored on:

• How Zarr and AnnData facilitate scalable biomedical image processing for cutting edge research,
• How to further optimize biomedical workflows.

The seminar was organized by PyData Yerevan together PMI Science R&D center.

PyData Yerevan is an educational program that provides a forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other (https://www.linkedin.com/company/pydata-yerevan/about/).

To note that PMI Science in Armenia is an active participant in the country's tech and innovation ecosystem, partnering with local institutions. Around $30 million USD has been invested in scholarships for research by institutions. PMI Science also serves as a sponsor and partner in various local science community initiatives.