AE����

Ashwini Kshirsagar was born in India and, after a grade school biology project piqued her interest in science, pursued a career in medical imaging. Irina Panteleeva grew up in Russia and later moved to Western Europe to study epigenetics, which focuses on how changes in a cell’s chemistry can affect gene activity, before becoming a scientist at a small startup company.

While these two women may appear to have little in common, they’re connected in one important way: Kshirsagar and Panteleeva are both patent holders of innovative technologies at AE���� and belong to a relatively small percentage of women patent holders globally. While it’s reported that only 18% of inventors holding international patents were women in 2023,¹ this number continues to rise.

Leading the way in breast cancer detection

After earning her PhD from the University of Cambridge and moving to the U.S., Kshirsagar joined a startup in the early 2000s called R2 Technology, which later became part of AE����. Her work as an algorithm development scientist focused on computer-aided detection, a software that helps identify areas suspicious of breast cancer on mammography images.

“These were the early stages of what we know today as AI, though that buzzword wasn’t around yet,” says Kshirsagar. “Technology wasn't as fast for processing the data, so everything was on a much smaller scale. Today, we see AI models that have millions of tuning parameters — but we started with just one or two layers of mathematical models.”

Other major advancements in mammography over the past few decades include the transition from film to digital and the arrival of the 3D mammogram — an imaging test that combines multiple x-ray “slices” to create a 3D picture of the breast — which ushered in a new era for cancer screening. But with this new technology, new scientific problems emerged for Kshirsagar and her team.

Because both the 2D and 3D images are needed, in combination, for a radiologist to make a clinical diagnosis, concerns were raised about the additional x-ray exposure for the patient with two sets of images being taken. The solution? A technology called C-View^TM Software, which combines all the “slices” from the 3D mammogram into a computer-generated 2D image that can be compared against a woman’s prior 2D scans. Besides minimizing the patient’s radiation exposure, this technology can help improve workflow efficiency for the radiologist.

“Anything we can do to help the radiologist find smaller and smaller cancer is what we’re focused on,” says Kshirsagar, who is listed as a patent owner for the C-View Software, as well as multiple other innovations related to modern AI use in breast cancer detection.

One such technology is the groundbreaking Genius AI® Detection solution, which was shown to find approximately one additional cancer for every 10 identified by a radiologist in a study submitted to the FDA.²  The team continues to innovate Genius AI Detection, and the latest version of the technology demonstrated over a 70% reduction in false positive marks compared with 2D ImageChecker CAD, AE����’s original cancer detection AI solution.³