UA Professor receives hefty 3-year cancer research grant

The National Institutes of Health-National Cancer Institute has funded Peter Bartels, an optical sciences professor, for the last seven years under an Outstanding Investigator Grant program.

"This is merely a continuation of research that I have done for 30 years and I have always received generous support from the NIH," Bartels said. "The research is absolutely exciting - it's a very objective process done with great skill."

Computer technology is looming on the horizon as a powerful agent in the diagnosis of cancer cells due to Bartels' research, the pioneer of digitized cancer assessments.

"I began thinking about a decade ago about how machines might apply reasoning skills in analyses of very much more complex imagery," Bartels said. "There are bonuses built into computer-assisted image assessment that don't exist in human perception and reasoning."

For the last 32 years, Bartels said he has systematically constructed a "system capable of seeing an image like a pathologist, but with pure objectivism.

"Human vision has evolved phylogenetically - that is, we have the ability to see things to help us survive, but we have not evolved to process the high-complex number systems," Bartels said. "The computer has the ability to extract diagnostic information that a human cannot see. Natural selection did not code for high-number processing."

In a report released on the project, Bartels posed the predicament of "how to make a machine not just see an image, but understand the image so the system can properly interpret the information."

"This is something new in automation, because you are automating a mental function. Engineers don't know what is going on in the mind of a diagnostician," Bartels said.

Bartels was inspired to invent a computer capable of quantitatively analyzing microscopic human tissues images because humans are often inconsistent in interpreting cancer lesions. Although the diagnostic tool has not been implemented on a wide scale, the imaging prowess of Bartels' machine has generated global notoriety for the UA optical sciences lab.

"We have visitors coming from all over the world who use these methods, because we have the most advanced lab in the world in terms of capability," Bartels said. "We were the first to use the computer as a perceptive agent."

A sundry of sciences, such as physics, optics, mathematics, and pathology, glitters Bartels resume.

"Dr. Bartels is a great man and the breadth of his knowledge is outstanding," said Deborah Thompson, principal systems programmer for optical sciences. "He straddles many different disciplines and is like a renaissance type of professor."