For the past year, I have been working with Claronav, a surgical navigation company in Toronto, to improve surgical navigation with AI by creating algorithms that can automatically detect structures in a patient’s CT scans. These detections help the surgical navigation software build a ‘virtual model’ of the patient that is used during surgery.

So, instead of having a surgeon spend their valuable time looking through and annotating a patient’s scans, I teach machines to understand these scans all on their own. This work has been very fun and rewarding! When I began, there were just CT scans. Now, there is an intelligent machine that has learned to understand this highly complex data in less than a second!

Special thank you to Doron Dekel and Ingmar Bitter for all of your help and guidance!

Last summer, I began creating a new histopathology image search algorithm to speed up and improve the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. I’ve been performing this research at the University of Waterloo KIMIA Lab (a global leader in histopathology image search) and am finalizing the research paper now!

Why is this important? When diagnosing a patient, pathologists often search through many past cases and check for similarities to the current patient. However, this process is extremely time-consuming and unreasonable when looking at thousands of past cases.

In my research, I propose a new histopathology image search algorithm that allows pathologists to search through thousands of past scans and find the most similar cases in only a few seconds.

Thank you Prof. Hamid Tizhoosh for your amazing guidance and support!

I have finally finished high school and am beginning my new journey at the University of Toronto! With a focus on Computer Science, I am also planning to dive deep into Mathematics, Psychology, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, and more!

I would also love to hear about any courses or topics that you enjoyed and would recommend. So, please let me know!

Feel free to connect with and follow me on LinkedIn!

Check out my website shalev.ca for more info.

Email me at lifshitz.shalev@gmail.com.