Deep Learning for Medical Discovery

IMPORTANT NOTE: Meetups are free for QAIC members or $10 at the door (card/cash). We will have people on arrival to check you in or register to be an annual member ($45) but, to make things easy, please register for a membership at https://brisbane.ai. Thanks :)

Topic
Major breakthroughs in recent years in microscopy and other biomedical imaging technologies have led to exponential growth in imaging data. For instance, the above image shows the Lattice Light Sheet Microscope recently installed at IMB, for which the inventor received a 2014 noble prize, and that will generate up to 7TB of image data per day once fully utilised. Similarly, high throughput screens of pharmacological agents for drug discovery are generating a wealth of imaging data.

These imaging technologies allow us to gain new insights into the human body during health and disease. These include how elements of the immune system work, the functions of the 20,000 or so protein-coding genes discovered in the human genome project, and what governs the behaviour of cancers cells.

In this talk, Dr Nick will describe three streams of his group's research utilising machine learning and deep learning for bio-imaging.
The first is in automated image classification to find the location of proteins in cells in high-throughput screens. This is useful both as a first step towards understanding the function of the protein, as well as for detecting subtle changes in the protein under drug treatment. The second is in detection, classification and segmentation of histology imaging of non-melanoma skin cancers. And the third is in segmentation of “interesting” surface features of macrophage cells, towards understanding a new pathway of entry for molecules into immune system cells. Together, these promise new opportunities for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

About: Dr Nick Hamilton
Dr Nick is the Institute Bio-Mathematician at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland, and holds a co-appointment with the Research Computing Centre at UQ. He gained a PhD in Pure Mathematics from the University of Western Australia in 1996 and was subsequently awarded Fellowships in Australia and Belgium. In 2002, Nick made the decision to change fields into the exciting new areas of computational biology and bioinformatics, returned to Australia, and subsequently took up a position within the ARC Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics at UQ. In 2008 he was appointed as a Laboratory Head at IMB, and Institute Bio-Mathematician in 2014, where he continues to lead a group in bio-image informatics, mathematical modelling, machine learning, and data visualisation, developing methodologies to deal with the current deluge of data that new microscopy imaging technologies have enabled.

Since 2015, Dr Nick has also been one of the organisers of the Brisbane HealthHack which will run 14th - 16th September this year at Thoughtworks. This year features several machine learning as well as other health and bio-imaging problems, and he hopes that some of the Brisbane.AI group will join for a great weekend of hacking. https://www.healthhack.com.au/

Agenda:
6:00pm Mingling, networking and nibbles
6:30pm Dr Nick Hamilton (Institute for Molecular Bioscience, UQ)
7:30pm Mingling continued

To get to the venue take the elevators from within the old TC Beirne Building up to level 2. Lift access will close at 6.30pm. Let us know if you plan on arriving later.