IDF 2008: Boffins showcase technology arsenal to fight cancer

Intel has created a system that will aid physicians in the fight against skin cancer.

The decision-support tool, dubbed DermFind, will make it easier to detect melanoma by using sensor technology to build up a database of imagery for analysis. It was announced on the eve of Intel's developer forum (IDF) in San Francisco by Andrew Chien, vice president of the company’s corporate technology group and director of Intel Research.

In the UK, more than 2,000 people die each year from skin cancer, according to figures from Cancer Research UK. The majority of these deaths are from melanomas.

“Skin cancer is one of the most common kinds of cancer and doing anything about that is really quite difficult,” Chien said. “This is actually a pretty exciting project as it shows how sensing capabilities [engage] information into doing something quite powerful.”

DermFind is part of an umbrella research project called Interactive Search-Assisted Decision Support (ISADS) and is a collaborative effort between Intel researchers in Pittsburgh and physicians from the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. Using the system, clinicians take a picture of the patients’ skin lesion and then query it against a mammoth, annotated and tagged medical image database, with the aim of analysing similar cases and enhancing decision making. Users of the system can also take advantage of tools such as a ruler to measure lesions or the ability to zoom in or out of particular areas of the image.

“The goal is to provide tools that enable doctors to examine patients and also search a huge medical repository that will, hopefully, enable them to make better decisions,” said research engineer Richard Gass.

“[When we designed the system] we worked closely with doctors to make sure it was as streamlined as possible and fits very easily into their clinical workflow.”

Dr Mei Chen, senior scientist at Intel Research, Pittsburgh, added: “We are trying to help people bridge the physical world with the digital world. The DermFind system will retrieve other visually-similar cases and all this will help the physician to make a more informed decision.”

Email to a friend

Print this page

Social Bookmark this article: What is this?

Digg

Delicious

Reddit

StumbleUpon

Slashdot

Google

Facebook