From a robotic mission to the moon to contact-free cancer detection

A behind the scenes look at the challenges and opportunities of working on two vastly different systems. Attendees will learn about the technical innovations and obstacles associated with building and launching the first private interplanetary lander to reach the moon on a shoestring budget. The seminar will then shift gears 12 orders of magnitude down to preview the development of a method for contact-free detection of skin cancer. By developing a novel laser tissue barcoding technology, we were able to build the first accurately aligned data set mapping non-invasive Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images to histology samples. This enables the training of a neural network that non-destructively generates human pathology slices from OCT. The ability to align histology slices with in-vivo imaging with high precision paves the way for biopsy-free histology and the potential for further basic biomedical sciences and drug discovery.