Making ultrasound more accessible with AI guidance

"I would love to see a future where looking inside the body becomes as routine as a blood pressure cuff measurement," says Charles Cadieu '04, MEng '05. As president of the medical technology startup Caption Health, he sees that future in reach--with the help of artificial intelligence. Cadieu still remembers the "lightbulb moment" during his postdoctoral research at MIT when he realized that the field of AI would never be the same. He was working in the lab of James DiCarlo (now the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience) on neural networks--AI systems made up of deep-learning algorithms that emulate the dense networks of neurons in the brain. Until then, neural networks had been unable to perform even simple visual tasks that the brain handles with ease.