With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1313659
When federal Minister of Inno- vation, Science and Economic Development Navdeep Bains announced the first projects to be funded under the B.C.-based Canada's Digital Technology Supercluster initiative last year, he chose as his venue not a blue-chip participant like Telus Corp., Providence Health Care or the BC Cancer Agency. Instead, he spoke from the Van- couver office of a small startup, MetaOptima Technology. It was MetaOptima's software platform, DermEn- gine, after all, that was a key enabling technology behind the Dermatology Point-of-Care Intelligent Network, a col- laboration aimed at improving access to and the accuracy of skin cancer diagnoses. Integrated with tele-pathology imaging created by Change Healthcare, it uses artificial intelligence to help derma- tologists remotely zero in on possible cases of melanoma at an early stage, when treatment has the best chance of success. If successful, the $9.8-million pilot project continuing in B.C. this year will be expanded to health regions across Canada, where skin cancer strikes 80,000 people annually. "I really saw this as a test bed for Canadian implemen- tation," says MetaOptima's co-founder and CEO, Maryam Sadeghi. Since the company's founding in 2012, its technol- ogy has been used on more than a million patients world- wide, but until now MetaOp- tima has been frustrated getting its foot in the door of the monolithic Canadian health-care system. The Super- cluster project has opened a channel of communication to Health Canada and created a template for joint ventures with both for-profit and clini- cal partners in this country, Sadeghi says. DermEngine is actually MetaOptima's second big innovation. The first was Mole- Scope, an attachment that can turn an ordinary smartphone into a medical imaging tool capable of spotting early-stage melanoma. The company has sold more than 70,000 units of the device, almost all of them outside Canada. Between the two products, which are constantly being upgraded with new features, MetaOptima has the potential not just to save lives but to save the health-care system huge amounts of money. "Our GPs, from 100 cases that they refer [to dermatologists], 97 are benign," Sadeghi says. "Hun- dreds of millions of dollars are wasted every year just in unnecessary procedures. We can cut 50 percent of this cost." Sadeghi herself came from a computer science background, not a medical one. It was while working on her PhD on a scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research at UBC that the Iranian-born AI specialist was introduced to the medical applications of the technology, especially in der- matology. She was surprised to find most of the records that made up her research material, including photos, were avail- able only in paper. "That was the point I realized there was a big problem," Sadeghi says. Fortunately, "I love solving real-life problems and serving patients and doctors." –M.M. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020 BCBUSINESS 27 H E A L T H C A R E Sk in in the G ame Take the perennial threats of cyberbullying, terrorist recruitment and child pornography, layer in political polarization, mass protest and foreign meddling in a U.S. election year, and top it off with a pandemic that has shut down parts of the economy, con- fined people to their homes and stoked conspiracy theories, and the Internet has become a very scary place in 2020. That may have had something to do with why the World Economic Forum chose Kelowna-based Two Hat Security as one of 100 global Technology Pioneers this year. One of the world's largest moderators of web content, Two Hat screens 100 billion messages a month–up from 30 billion pre- COVID– for dangerous and inappropriate content on behalf of clients such as gaming, education, live streaming and messaging providers (Activision, Hatch, Kidzworld, MovieStar Planet and Rovio, among oth- ers). It's a never-ending task as malevolent actors keep finding new ways into these gated spaces. As part of the WEF nod, Two Hat founder and executive chair Chris Priebe (who co-founded children's game space Club Penguin, acquired by Disney Interactive Studios in 2007 for US$350 million) now sits on a committee dedicated to combating misinformation and hate online. "For me, it's an opportunity to work with other minds more brilliant than my own on how to solve these very dif- ficult problems," Priebe says. –M.M. C Y B E R S E C U R I T Y Ever y thing in M o d eration Two Hat founder Chris Priebe