Scanning a tissue sample for cancer cells is a painstakingly time consuming process. A pathologist has to look over the sample slide in a microscope, checking each cell to see if there is an abnormality. However, a surprising Japanese artificial intelligence (AI) machine called BakeryScan that identifies bakery items has come to the rescue. According to an article reported in The New Yorker, a doctor once walked into a Tokyo bakery in 2019. There, he saw a multitude of pastry items he could choose from and got excited. But it was the checkout process that impressed him the most.

An artificial intelligence system that was originally designed to distinguish between different types of pastry in Japan in 2013 was adapted to identify cancers, The New Yorker reports. The system, called "BakeryScan," was first launched back in 2013 by Hisashi Kambe, a computer systems engineer. The system, which is still around and can be bought for roughly $20,000, gives local bakeries a hand by doing basic tasks like distinguishing croissants from bear claws. It can cut down on employee training and make the checkout process more hygienic, according to the company. But several years later, a doctor from the Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research in Kyoto realized that the clever tool could be used for a very different purpose as well: recognizing cancerous cells in microscope slides.

One morning in the spring of 2019, I entered a pastry shop in the Ueno train station, in Tokyo. After taking a tray and tongs at the front, you browsed, plucking what you liked from heaps of baked goods. What first struck me was the selection, which seemed endless: there were croissants, turnovers, Danishes, pies, cakes, and open-faced sandwiches piled up everywhere, sometimes in dozens of varieties. But I was most surprised when I got to the register. At the urging of an attendant, I slid my items onto a glowing rectangle on the counter. A nearby screen displayed an image, shot from above, of my doughnuts and Danish.