How lasers and AI could help detect cancerous tissue in minutes [Video]

A cancer detecting system built from scratch at the University of Waterloo (UW) is nearing completion and could be on the market within two years.

An engineering team began work on the Photon Absorption Remote Sensing (PARS) system in 2017. It aims to speed up the process of detecting cancerous tissue in patients which, in turn, could speed up treatment.

“With one look, we can get all the answers,” Parsin Haji Reza, a professor and the project’s lead researcher at UW said.

It uses lasers to read a tissue sample, generate data and then feed that data to an AI system.

“The AI basically translates this data – this multi-dimensional data – into information and into images that doctors, pathologists and clinicians can read,” Reza said, adding it should take less than half an hour in total.

He said the traditional biopsy process involves taking a piece of tissue, dividing …