Mese: Aprile 2021

Science and food do not have to be mutually exclusive: cancer researchers in Japan have been working with software developers to adapt an innovative computer program that can identify hundreds of different types of pastries at the cash register into a program that can detect cancer cells under a microscope lens.

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So enough about introductions, let’s get to today’s Learn English with the News topic:

Adapted from this article. 

Full text:

“A software company called Brain has been working with a cancer research center in Kyoto, Japan to adapt software they created for the Japanese bakeries into a program that can detect cancer cells under a microscope lens.

Brain’s software, BakeryScan, was created in 2007 and has since been improved to allow Japan’s bakeries to easily identify different types of pastries at the cash register.

The pastry industry needed this complex software because of Japan’s very diverse food tastes. The country’s long trade history led to its desire for a variety of flavors. For this reason, unlike French or Italian bakeries that offer only a few options, Japanese bakeries offer pastries of all sizes, shapes, flavors, and colors. There are hundreds of different types of pastries in these unique bakeries.

The many different types of pastries caused cashiers to spend months learning the price of each individual pastry based on sight alone. This meant that the checkout process was not only very difficult for cashiers, but also caused long wait times for customers.

Brain, which was founded by computer programmer and software designer Hisashi Kambe, had always worked on projects based on computer visualization capabilities and so to combat this problem at the cash register they created BakeryScan.

BakeryScan is unique because, unlike deep learning software like Google Translate, Siri, and almost every AI system out there, it doesn’t need large amounts of specialized data to make decisions; it is created to understand irregularities like the shadow cast into the middle of a donut hole or the slightly darker color of over-baked bread without needing the input of tens of thousands of similar images.

When a doctor at the Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research, in Kyoto, saw a television segment about the machine, he realized that cancer cells, under a microscope, looked a lot like bread. He contacted Hisashi Kambe’s company Brain to see how they could collaborate to develop a version of the program that could help pathologists detect cancer cells.

The program they came up with, Cyto-Aiscan, is currently being tested in two major hospitals in Kobe and Kyoto. It is capable of “whole-slide” analysis, meaning that it can analyze an entire microscope slide and identify the cells that might be cancerous. The software considers the color tone of the nucleus, its size and texture, and its overall roundness and can lead to earlier diagnoses by speeding up the process, ultimately allowing for more effective treatments for cancer patients.”