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Researchers at Waterloo Engineering have developed technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify collapsed lungs from chest x-rays with greater accuracy than radiologists.

The system can now identify 75 per cent of cases - compared to less than 50 per cent for medical experts using chest x-rays - and researchers are working to boost that rate to more than 90 per cent.

We have an intimate relationship with technology. It is infused in our daily life, from our home and car to our finances and health care. As we welcome new technologies into our most personal spaces, there is a growing recognition that design-based thinking needs to consider ethics and the users it serves.

A recent discovery made by Professor Parsin Haji Reza and his research team at the PhotoMedicine Labs has found a novel approach with the potential to make major changes to the surgical oncology field.

There is no cure for cancer, but treatment could be dramatically improved thanks to an invention out of the University of Waterloo.

Parsin Haji Reza and his team at the university are working to revolutionize cancer detection.

“We discovered that we can use our technology to distinguish between the healthy and cancerous tissue,” said Haji Reza, director of the PhotoMedicine Labs at the university.  

This week, the denizens of Twitter began posting photos of themselves with an odd array of labels. Some, like “face,” were confusingly benign, while others appeared to verify harder truths: Your humble writer was declared a cipher, a nobody, “a person of no influence.” Fair enough. But many of the labels were more troubling. There were rape suspects and debtors. A person would be labeled not just black, but “negro” and “negroid.”

A second-year Waterloo Engineering student shared the top prize at a recent hackathon focused on the creation of technology to protect privacy.

Lena Nguyen of systems design engineering teamed up with Anne Chung, a second-year computer science student at the University of Waterloo, to develop software that puts browsers on kids mode by disabling web page fields asking for sensitive information such as addresses and credit card numbers.

Cancer treatment could be dramatically improved by an invention at the University of Waterloo to precisely locate the edges of tumors during surgery to remove them.

The new imaging technology uses the way light from lasers interacts with cancerous and healthy tissues to distinguish between them in real-time and with no physical contact, an advancement with the potential to eliminate the need for secondary surgeries to get missed malignant tissue.