Revolutionizing Shape Measurements for Radiology and Biotech: BrainScanology

As we all know, the human brain is the command center for the nervous system and enables our thoughts, memory, movement, and emotions. Maintaining a healthy brain is crucial to living a healthy and fulfilling life. Globally, there have been various inventions to measure the brain and gauge its activities. Among these is BrainScanology’s software called ShapeGenie, which has made it possible to measure shape apart from area or volume. Based on the Linearized Compressed Polar Coordinates (LCPC) Transform, invented by Dr. David H. Nguyen, PhD, Co-founder and CEO of BrainScanology, http://www.ShapeGenie.net can measure what area or volume cannot even see, enhancing a radiologist’s, surgeon’s, and scientist’s diagnostic intuition by 1,000 times.

Dr. Nguyen had a college roommate and good friend who suffered from bipolar disorder. His name was Thuan Trinh. About seven years after college, Trinh took his own life. During this time, Dr. Nguyen also struggled with deep depression. At Trinh’s funeral, Dr. Nguyen promised that one day he would do something about bipolar disorder. At that time, he didn’t know what the promise would look like, since he was a cancer biologist. But today, that promise is BrainScanology and a software that can potentially detect bipolar disorder through MRIs of the brain. But the story is only half complete without mention of another loss in Dr. Nguyen’s life. His favorite high school science teacher, Duane Nichols, died of an aggressive form of colon cancer. Wanting to commemorate Nichols at his memorial service, which Dr. Nguyen could not attend, Dr. Nguyen spent sleepless nights staring at histology images of colon polyps and scribbling various ways to quantify their shapes. Thus was born the LCPC Transform that would become the foundational algorithm of BrainScanology.

In conversation with the Dr. David H. Nguyen, CEO of BrainScanology

Q. Can you explain your services in brief?

People upload outlines of the shapes that they are interested in measuring. These are shapes from images in MRIs, CT scans, X-rays, or images of cells from a microscope. http://www.ShapeGenie.net analyzes the shapes and provides a number for each shape. These numbers are different than what area, volume, and perimeter measures.

Q. What are the challenges you had to face while developing solutions for BrainScanology? How did you overcome them?

Early on, it was hard to get the attention and support from experts because I had not applied the LCPC Transform in depth on any diseases. However, over the past three years, tremendous progress has been made and I have proven many uses for ShapeGenie in radiology, healthtech, biotech, and pharma. Visit the “Use Cases” page on www.BrainScanology.com for examples. Furthermore, we have developed an ML model that is 95% accurate for detecting Alzheimer’s Disease by using only three slices per MRI stack. Our competitors need hundreds of slices per MRI to do volume and surface area measures, but we can do it with just three.

Q. For our readers, could you elaborate simply on what the LCPC method is and its uses?

The LCPC Transform turns 2D shapes, like an oval drawn on a piece of paper or a letter of the alphabet, into a squiggly sound wave that reveals secrets hidden to the naked eye. In this form, a powerful algorithm called the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) can decompose the wave into simpler waves. In effect, the LCPC Transform allows the FFT to break apart an oval into individual waves that the eye cannot see. These individual waves reveal differences between different shapes in ways that length, area, and volume cannot. Think of a dog whistle. Human ears cannot hear a dog whistle’s sound frequencies, but dog ears can. The LCPC Transform in partnership with the FFT helps us see frequencies that the eye cannot. In nature, just because you can’t see or hear something, does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Q. How do your solutions align with the existing medical practice?

Our software works very well with current imaging methods, including MRI, CT Scans, X-rays, ultrasound, and even images taken from a smartphone camera. The reason is because we measure shape, and not signal intensity. This means that if we can consistently pick out the shape we want to measure, our software works on high-resolution imaging, such as 7T MRI, or low-resolution imaging, such as ultrasound. We are working on three projects internally, Alzheimer’s Disease (brain MRIs), diabetic retinopathy (fundus images), and rheumatoid arthritis of the hands (hand X-ray/CT/MRI). For example, our Alzheimer’s model is based on the shape of the lateral ventricles in the brain. These ventricles are obvious to the eye even in CT scans, which are lower in resolution than MRI, but cheaper and faster. Thus, once we get access to CT scans of cognitively normal patients, we can verify that our MRI-based Alzheimer’s models also work on CT scans. This would be a huge cost-savings for healthcare systems if CT scans can be used in place of MRIs for dementia diagnosis.

Q. Where do you stand as a company in the current market landscape? And what are you doing to stay ahead of the curve?

Our software, ShapeGenie, is unique. We have submitted non-provisional patent applications and are streamlining the image processing pipeline to make it easy for scientists and physicians to use. While we can build in traditional shape measurement methods into our software, our competitors cannot include the LCPC Transform into their software without our permission. We plan to offer great B2B deals to get large pharma and biotech companies to adopt our technology.

Q. How do you market your services?

For now, it is by word of mouth, but once we release the beta version of http://www.ShapeGenie.net in January of 2023, we will employ targeted email marketing, social media advertising, and companies that specialize in reaching decision-makers in relevant industries. We will also host free workshops at universities to teach people how to use ShapeGenie. Our basic account is free, because we do a “freemium subscription” model, so anyone curious can try our software without paying.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

The beta version of http://www.ShapeGenie.net will be available for subscription and free trials in January of 2023. We have started, and will continue, to offer consulting services based on our technology so that customers know how to best prepare their data to get the most out of ShapeGenie. We have tutorials on the core concepts of how to prepare data for ShapeGenie on the “tutorials” page of http://www.BrainScanology.com.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

We can’t wait to get our software into the hands of creative people. They will make groundbreaking discoveries in their fields, in a very short period of time. Our software is so good at finding differences in biological shapes that we are excited about how we and others will create sex- and race-specific machine learning (ML) models to detect disease. Artificial intelligence (AI) and ML are only as smart as the data you feed it. Racial bias and gender bias are major issues within something called “data bias.” If the data you train your ML models on are mostly from white males in North America, then these models will be inaccurate for people who are not male, not white, and not from North America. These people will be under-diagnosed and misdiagnosed by AI/ML, meaning they will suffer more and die more often. AI/ML has a huge role to play in the future of healthcare, so data bias is a major problem that we need to address now.

Meet the Leader Behind the Success of BrainScanology

Dr. Nguyen, CEO of BrainScanology grew up in a poor Vietnamese immigrant family that lived in an underserved Hispanic neighborhood. He understands what life is like for people from challenging socio-economic and ethnic minority backgrounds. That neighborhood is where he learned to play baseball and football, heard Mariachi music, ate his first quesadilla (with authentic Mexican cheese), and where his teenage-self fell in love with Gloria Estefan, Daisy Fuentes, and Vanessa Williams. The same life, health, and career struggles his family went through; his neighbors also went through. Thus, he is doing his part of reverse the racial- and gender-bias in the problem of “data bias” that plagues medical artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Dr. Nguyen teamed up with Dr. Ismail Badjie, PharmD, CEO of InnovaRx Global Health (in Gambia), to build diagnostic artificial intelligence (AI) for diabetic retinopathy and rheumatoid arthritis through a smartphone camera for African countries. BrainScanology is reversing the trend of racial data bias in AI by starting with people of color first when training its machine learning models. We will also archive a portion of our data for access by researchers around the world. This project is called the Medical AI for African Nations (MAfoAN) Initiative: https://africamedicalai.wordpress.com/. Medical clinics from Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo will also be joining the movement, so this initiative has become a continental collaboration.

Meet the Co-Founder Supporting BrainScanology

Harini Kumar, MBA, is the COO and Co-founder of BrainScanology. She crossed paths with co-founder and CEO David Nguyen, PhD, in 2015 working as a research intern in his lab. After doing research with Dr. Nguyen, Harini went on to complete a Bachelor’s of Science in Cognitive Science at University of California, Santa Cruz. She then began climbing corporate ladders in the fields of data science and business, before attaining an MBA in Strategy and Marketing from University of California, Davis. Above all, Harini’s passion for female entrepreneurship and empowerment supports her enthusiasm for commercializing BrainScanology’s powerful technology. Unless there is a viable business model, scientific inventions cannot get out of the research lab to benefit people’s daily lives.

“The LCPC Transform turns 2D shapes, like an oval drawn on a piece of paper or a letter of the alphabet, into a squiggly sound wave that reveals secrets hidden to the naked eye.”