Beyond genomics, what can we learn from live cell imaging?

We are excited to host our 6th meetup of AI in Genomics!
Note that this event will be hosted at Google For Startups Campus (Tel Aviv).

In this event, Dr. Assaf Zaritsky (BGU) and Daniella Gilboa (AIVF) will demonstrate how AI applied to live cell imaging is revolutionizing the way we understand cellular function.

Schedule:

17:45 - Gathering + Snacks :-)

18:15 - Dr. Assaf Zaritsky (Assistant Professor @BGU)

"Extracting the invisible from live cell microscopy"

Cells are the fundamental unit of structure and function in all organisms. Microscopy is the only technology that enables us to see how live cells perform specific functions. For almost 500 years, cell biologists stare at
microscopy images of cells to learn about how they look and behave in normal processes and in disease. This ability to visualize cells has driven our current understanding of cells and led to vast scientific achievements, multiple Nobel prizes and discovery and development of therapeutics. In recent years, the field of cell biology has undergone a revolution driven by the emergence of new technologies in microscopy, molecular biology, automation and computation. Cell imaging has entered the “big data” era with high content and multidimensional data sets encapsulating complex and dynamic patterns that are inaccessible by human visual observation and that are absolutely necessary for taking our understanding of the cell’s structure and function to the next level. Motivated by fundamental questions in cell biology my lab produces biological insights along with specialized analytic tools that reveal hidden patterns in dynamic cell imaging data. I will demonstrate these concepts with several specific projects in my lab on cancer metastasis and developmental-related processes.

Bio: Assaf Zaritsky is an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Department of Software and Systems Information Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel. B.Sc.&M.Sc. in computer science at BGU, and Ph.D. in computer science at Tel Aviv University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at UT Southwestern Medical Center and joined BGU in October 2018. His research is in computational cell dynamics, at the interface of data science and cell biology. Lab’s website: https://www.assafzaritsky.com/, Twitter handle: @AssafZaritsky

19:00 - Daniella Gilboa (co-founder&CEO @AIVF)

"AIVF - Transforming IVF with the Power of Artificial Intelligence"

Over 180M women worldwide cannot conceive naturally and over 2.4M IVF treatments are performed annually to help some of these women overcome their extremely frustrating reality. Unfortunately, most IVF treatments fail and do not lead to the desired pregnancy. New methods to enhance IVF efficacy could offer an enormous opportunity to address unmet medical needs, improve the economic burden and increase success rates. IVF procedures are currently reliant on manual microscopy imaging, and image analysis and embryo selection are still performed in a labor-intensive manner. Embryo selection remains highly dependent on the embryologists' capabilities and experience and thus notoriously error prone. The increasing volume of newly introduced IVF time-lapse images further complicates this timeconsuming critical stage. Fortunately, deep AI models can now take advantage of these time-lapse images and both automate and increase the accuracy of viable embryo selection. AIVF's AI algorithms are based on a large body of embryological data and years of IVF expertise input. We shall present AIVF's unique vision, solutions and results.

Bio: Daniella Gilboa, co-founder and CEO of AIVF.
Senior Clinical Embryologist and Biostatistician.
BSc, MSc Molecular Biology from Bar Ilan University;
MSc Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Tel Aviv University