True Detectives: These Human Owls Are Using AI To Catch Cancer
Not much gets past Chad McClennan and his elite detective squad of owls (yes, you read that right). The “chief executive owl” of the healthcare startup Koios Medical, McClennan explains that several of his engineers were military sleuths before applying their talents to breast cancer detection. “They were working for a U.S. Army defense contractor, using facial recognition technology to catch bad guys in foreign lands,” he says. “They realized that the same techniques could be applied to radiology.”
Catching dangerous criminals and diagnosing suspicious lesions sound like two very different disciplines, but McClennan says they have something in common: the evidence. Ultrasound — the procedure radiologists use to see inside the deep structures of the human body by recording the echoes of high-frequency soundwaves — generates black and white, or grayscale, images that are visually similar to the grainy satellite images of suspects skulking around in the shadows.
The naked eye cannot quickly make sense of those countless, highly variable shades of gray, but artificial intelligence (AI) can. Computer algorithms that have been trained on hundreds of thousands of similar images, whether they are human faces or body tissue, can instantly zero in on subtle shapes and telltale patterns that can betray wanted criminals or lurking tumors.
That’s how Koios — pronounced ‘Kee-os’ — was born in 2011. Named after the Titan who represented rational intelligence in Greek mythology and headquartered in Chicago, the company chose an owl as its corporate logo, and several of the company’s 30 employees have job titles that pay homage to the nocturnal bird. “Owls are wise, and they see in the dark, and radiologists are the same,” says McClennan. “They sit in dark rooms with large monitors making interpretations.”
It didn’t take long for the owls to taste success. After just a few years of experimentation, they found that their smart ultrasound technology was outperforming human radiologists at accurate cancer detection. Hospitals began to enhance their picture archiving and communication systems (PACs) with the company’s software. You can see a button bearing “Koios” on GE Healthcare’s LOGIQ E10, the company’s premium flagship ultrasound system.
