Conquering Cancer with Sergio Pereira from Lunit

AI seems to be taking the world by storm, and it is easy to use this new technology for either good or bad. Today I am joined by Sérgio Pereira, the VP of AI Research, Oncology Group, at Lunit, a company using AI for good by conquering cancer with machine learning.

You’ll hear about Sérgio’s professional background, Lunit’s missions, how they use AI for cancer screening and treatment planning, and so much more. Sérgio delves into how they read imaging before discussing the differences between supervised, self-supervised, and contrastive learning. Lunit has created an incredible dataset called Ocelot, and he tells us all about its benefits, how they published it, and why publishing a paper while ensuring that quality products are being produced is a challenge. Finally, Sérgio tells us his hopes for the future of Lunit.

Key Points:

• A brief overview of Sérgio Pereira's background, and what led him to Lunit. 
• Lunit’s mission and why it’s important in fighting cancer. 
• How Lunit applies machine learning for cancer screening and treatment planning.
• What most of the Lunit products are based on and how genetics come into play. 
• Why subjectivity becomes an issue when it comes to reading images in machine learning. 
• Sérgio explains what supervised, self-supervised, and contrastive learning is.
• The lessons from machine learning work that can be applied to other types of imaging. 
• He tells us about Lunit’s dataset, Ocelot, and the benefits of it.
• How Lunit publishes their datasets. 
• The challenges of getting a paper out while getting a product on the market. 
• Sérgio shares some important things AI-powered startups need to consider. 
• Where Sérgio sees the impact of Lunit in the near future. 

Quotes:

“Our mission at Lunit is to conquer cancer through AI.” — Sérgio Pereira

“We don’t have many products at Lunit, that’s a fact, but the ones we have, we believe they are [the] best-in-class.” — Sérgio Pereira

“Mistakes in healthcare can have a very big impact, so we need to be able to show and demonstrate that our products work as we promised.” — Sérgio Pereira

“AI can be used for good and for bad. Let’s make sure we work on the good part.” — Sérgio Pereira

Links:

Sérgio Pereira on LinkedIn

Sérgio Pereira on Google Scholar

Sérgio Pereira on Twitter

Lunit Inc.
Paper: OCELOT: Overlapped Cell on Tissue Dataset for Histopathology

Dataset: OCELOT

Paper: Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning on Diverse Pathology Datasets

Resources for Computer Vision Teams:

LinkedIn – Connect with Heather.

Computer Vision Insights Newsletter – A biweekly newsletter to help bring the latest machine learning and computer vision research to applications in people and planetary health.

Computer Vision Strategy Session – Not sure how to advance your computer vision project? Get unstuck with a clear set of next steps. Schedule a 1 hour strategy session now to advance your project.

Computer Vision Advisory Services – Monthly advisory services to help you strategically plan your CV/ML capabilities, reduce the trial-and-error of model development, and get to market faster.