Contribution of AI: The Augmented Reality Microscope (ARM)

Artificial Intelligence has spread to almost all major and minor sectors and has been growing exponentially over the past few years. With the medical breakthrough in 2017 of AI identifying arrhythmia, researchers have developed microscopes for real-time diagnosis of cancer in 2018. It involved remodelling a standard microscope with deep neural networks integrating augmented reality giving a tool what is termed as the Augmented Reality Microscope. In such a microscope, a neural network is integrated for detection of tumor once the biopsy is conducted. Here, the eyepiece plays the role of the eye, AR is the 3-D image captured (which is the Field of View) and the role of the brain is played by the network. The output of the network is in the form of a heatmap which depicts the probability of cancer at each pixel location. The ARM has to its name a number of benefits like low equipment cost, low latency and also keeps pace with semi-continuous movements of the slide thus improving the accuracy of quantitative tissue assessments. With this we are ARM-ed well to fight against the unfortunate and sometimes catastrophic disease called cancer.