写的:
萨德帖)
执行董事，计算病理学，肿瘤R&D、澳门葡京网赌游戏
当我还是个孩子的时候，我喜欢英国广播公司世界频道的周六特别节目. I never could have imagined this childhood pastime would set me on the path to discovering my passion for patient care and life’s work. It started with a special on the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I had never heard of the CDC and was mesmerised by the way the programme described chasing down patient zero at the heart of a pandemic and seeking ways to ease human suffering through medicine.
我是一个孤独，笨拙的孩子，喜欢阅读. 我不间断地阅读，不偏爱任何特定的体裁, 甚至读我哥哥姐姐的生物课本. 我读的大部分书都是推理小说, anything from Agatha Christie to Sherlock Holmes to the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. Mesmerised by the BBC special, a lightbulb went off for me: “They are the disease detectives!“就在那时，我知道我也会成为其中一员.
通往数字病理学之路
I grew up in India and saw the need for disease detectives all around me. Devastating diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis were endemic where I grew up; it was not uncommon to see lepers amongst the pedestrian traffic, and to have the word ‘tuberculosis sanatorium’ in a 6-year-old’s vocabulary is testament to the prevalence of this disease. 霍乱这个词使我母亲非常焦虑. I later learned she lost her favourite sister within a matter of hours to a cholera outbreak and could not say goodbye due to the quarantine measures. Every day I was acutely aware of the suffering these diseases caused. I went on to study microbiology and received my master’s degree with distinction and honours. However, I was frustrated at the lack of wet lab experience that would have allowed me to put my studies to use. 除了, I was painfully aware an isolated upbringing with my nose often in a book did not exactly prepare me for the world. I decided to put on hold any plans for further education and said yes when I was offered a position as a junior research fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). I was a misfit for lack of experience but approached this opportunity with grit, 决心和毅力. 这并不容易, but I understood what could happen if I applied my drive and ambition with a commitment to the long hours. I worked for four years in a community of researchers that asked the simple question why and how do cells die? 那些成长的岁月教会了我倾听, 用语言来表达我的好奇心, 设计实验, 解释结果并与同事沟通, 以及决定和优先考虑接下来要做什么. There was hardly a day that went by without a marvel on the bench proving a hypothesis whilst opening a door to an idea or an intrigue. Never had I experienced the very unique euphoria that comes from connecting the data points and completing the story with milestone experiments standing out like pearls on a chain.
When I did eventually receive my PhD, I ended up at a crossroads. I did not want to follow the same path as so many others before me — I craved a change that would lead me down new paths of exploration. So, I took another chance and joined a digital imaging and pathology department at a pharmaceutical company that would transform my life in ways I could have never imagined.
数字病理学:一个全新的世界
I had next to no experience in pathology, let alone digital pathology, but that was not a deterrence. The four years I spent with this group were similar to the formative four years I spent at NCBS. 我像海绵一样, 吸收病理实验室的知识, 数字病理技术, learning about the health platforms and the quantification of drug responses through image analysis in patients. The evolution of technology and its applications were absolutely astonishing, and so was the realisation of what we were actually accomplishing.
病理学重新点燃了我童年的激情, giving me new insights into the impact of scientific research and how mysteries of diseases are solved. 病人的潜力真的很鼓舞人心, but there was one big frustration for me: how pathology is practiced has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century.
Almost all cancer diagnoses are made or confirmed by pathologists through learned interpretation of morphological changes observed via an optical microscope, 主要来自H&e染色的肿瘤样本装在玻片上. This 19th century method, which relies on subjective pattern recognition, remains the gold standard. Pathologists are expected to also provide accurate quantitative measures such as tumour grade, 增殖指标及抗体染色强度, 哪些容易出现主观错误. 越来越多地, such expectations require precise measurement of complex heterogeneous and diverse patterns that are beyond the capacity of the human brain to analyse accurately. 虽然这些措施并不总是一致的, they are heavily relied upon for assessing the best potential treatment for people with cancer. The digital transformation occurred in radiology over 15 years ago, but a sufficiently compelling business case proved elusive in pathology because the gold standard method is highly cost-effective. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help transform these practices and will not only change the practice of pathology but will create massive imaging databases that can be mined to identify previously-unrecognised patterns that will provide new biological insights, improve diagnostic accuracy and accelerate the adoption of precision medicine.
科技飞速发展, 我知道我可以在这里留下自己的印记, helping to accelerate the process of getting new treatments to patients in need. 数字和计算病理学就是答案.
用数字和计算病理学改变结果
Digital and computational pathology have the potential to transform the field of medicine in unprecedented ways – by changing the practice of clinical drug development and driving the development of the next generation of precision medicine diagnostics.
A key part of putting patients first is choosing the right drug for the right patient at the right time. My team uses AI-driven methodology to extract objective information from tissue, utilise this information to predict responses to treatment and provide clinically-actionable conclusions to improve patient selection and develop personalised treatments. 澳门葡京赌博游戏的目标是建造更强大的, quantitative tools that equip drug development researchers with more clinically-actionable information than we could gain with the human eye. We have the ability to quantify millions of cells and the sum total of all their spatial relationships in exquisite detail in minutes. 而这仅仅是个开始.
The power of computational pathology approaches lies in its ability to provide objective, precise, and robust assessment of a tissue biomarker expression and localisation. 除了, 它们是广泛适用的, 组合, scalable, faster and deliver a more accurate diagnostic with increased reproducibility and greater predictivity. 随着技术的日新月异, the algorithms we are developing are becoming even more powerful and bridging the gap to achieving our goal for the patient.
One computational pathology approach is our flagship fully supervised algorithm: Quantitative Continuous Scoring (QCS). QCS not only looks for the presence or absence of a biomarker — an important indicator for targeted cancer treatments – but it identifies all tumour cells and quantifies the target biomarker at the pixel level in the entire sample. This has the potential to be the first AI-driven test, providing countless benefits to the patient. 通过使初级诊断过程更容易和更快, we can ensure patients are receiving the right treatment for their specific cancer quicker than ever before.
Enhancing the human element behind the data and computational science
I have been able to work on these incredible projects in my current role because once again, there was the desire for a challenge and the drive to better myself in that journey. I was hired by a small biotech company that was later acquired by AstraZeneca and it was once again a transformative moment of enormous proportions for me. 除了 to witnessing the growth in the field of digital and computational pathology, 我自己也经历了剧烈的成长. I went from the role of a senior scientist to a senior director in less than a year and acquired new skills and expertise that reminded me of the important role people play in medical research and discovery. Technology is a vector through which we enhance our abilities to identify, 治疗和治愈疾病, 但发现背后的驱动力是人. I am fortunate to have worked with such a talented and dedicated pool of skilled individuals, many of whom were my best resources for learning and shaped who I am today.
People continue to be responsible for all we accomplish in this field. There may be patterns beyond the capacity of machine learning and the human brain to compute, 尽管它有这么多神奇的品质, 人工智能仍然依赖于人类大脑的输入和解释. There are many questions still to be answered about AI and its role in our world going forward. 当涉及到计算病理学, however, I see a future where AI transforms pathologists into computational pathologists.
塑造数字和计算病理学的未来
我已经很长时间没有读推理小说了, but often times ponder about how those stories connect to the mysteries we continue to solve in research. Digital and computational pathology enables researchers to take on a role as a “disease detective,这比以往任何时候都更重要, 澳门葡京赌博游戏现在有很多新工具, 计算方法和技术使澳门葡京赌博游戏的工作变得超级强大.
It is a privilege to build the algorithms and steer the development of sophisticated software and tools that will change how computational pathology will improve patient lives. 澳门葡京赌博游戏即将为病人开创一个光明的新未来, and I am so proud to be part of the team at AstraZeneca that is leading the way.
哈达萨的故事是澳门葡京赌博游戏正在进行的系列节目的一部分: 肿瘤学先驱， which spotlights colleagues on the AstraZeneca Oncology team who are making an impact, 无论是个人还是职业.
