Google AI Tool Identifies a Tumor's Mutations From an Image

When I was in high school in the early 2000s, I spent a week of my summer vacation shadowing a pathologist at the local hospital. Every day in his basement office was basically the same; he'd focus his microscope on a slide of tissue, squinting for minutes at a time, methodically making notes about the shape of the cells, their size, their surroundings. When he had enough data points he'd make the phone call: "Squamous cell carcinoma." For decades, doctors have relied on the well-trained eyes of human pathologists to give their patients a cancer diagnosis. Now, researchers are teaching machines to do that time-intensive work in as little as a few seconds.