Yvan Saeys receives the AstraZeneca Foundation Award 2020
A jury from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) has recently selected the 2020 laureates of the AstraZeneca Foundation Awards.
This year the use of AI for the early detection and/ or treatment of diseases caught the attention of the independent jury. Yvan Saeys has been using AI and Machine Learning in the domain of bio-informatics for early detection of immune diseases. New systems based on flow cytometry of blood-samples are being implemented to analyse the immune system of patients. AI techniques allow to speed up the analyses of the vast data sets coming from more than the scanning of 25 000 cels/second and more than 30 parameters per cel. The team of Yvan Saeys succeeded in reducing the time for early diagnosis of the myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which may progress towards leukaemia, down to 30 seconds.
The bio-informatics team hopes to extend theses results to other types of diseases for which flow cytometry can be used as a diagnosis tool.
Read more on the FWO website (in Dutch).