Towards better than human capability in diagnosing prostate cancer using infrared spectroscopic imaging

Cancer diagnosis is essentially a human task. Almost universally, the process requires the extraction of tissue (biopsy) and examination of its microstructure by a human. To improve diagnoses based on limited and inconsistent morphologic knowledge, a new approach has recently been proposed that uses molecular spectroscopic imaging to utilize microscopic chemical composition for diagnoses. In contrast to visible imaging, the approach results in very large data sets as each pixel contains the entire molecular vibrational spectroscopy data from all chemical species. Here, we propose data handling and analysis strategies to allow computer-based diagnosis of human prostate cancer by applying a novel genetics-based machine learning technique ({\tt NAX). We apply this technique to demonstrate both fast learning and accurate classification that, additionally, scales well with parallelization. Preliminary results demonstrate that this approach can improve current clinical practice in diagnosing prostate cancer.