Profile:
Dr. Rupert Ecker has been co-founder of the TissueGnostics group in Austria, Romania, and USA. He is Chief Executive Officer in TissueGnostics-Austria and TissueGnostics-Romania, Vice President of TissueGnostics-USA, as well as Area Manager of TissueGnostics China Division.
Before founding TissueGnostics he was a research scientist at the Competence Centre for Bio Molecular Therapeutics in Vienna, a joint venture between the University of Vienna and the Novartis Research Centre.
As a co-inventor of the TissueFAXS technology Rupert Ecker has always been significantly involved in research and (product) development from system design to clinical testing and has successfully headed several joint R&D projects with academic partner institutions in the fields of advanced computer vision, cancer research, stem cell biology, and personalized medicine.
Rupert Ecker graduated in Cell Biology from the University of Vienna. He has more than 20 years of experience in microscopy and image analysis. In addition, he has been trained in software development.
Talk Title:
Contextual Tissue Image Cytometry Using AI-Empowered Precision Microscopy
Abstract:
While flow cytometry has been available for researchers and clinicians for decades to perform functional analyses on single cells and determine cellular phenotypes of large cell populations in blood, technologies to perform a similar analysis in situ – ie. in the tissue, the actual localization of most immune responses – are relatively new.
Our research teams at TissueGnostics and Queensland University of Technology have joined forces to combine TissueGnostics’ existing tissue cytometry technology platform and established knowhow with innovative AI solutions to establish The Virtual Histopathologist. This represents a tissue cytometry platform that allows to quantify immune responses where they happen – in the tissue.
The TissueFAXS Cytometry platform incorporates Machine & Deep Learning algorithms. It can do end-point assays as well as live-cell imaging and time-kinetic experiments to measure enzyme activity. It also promotes tissue cytometry to a new level of quality, where complex cellular interactions, intracellular expression profiles and signal transduction cascades can be addressed on the single-cell level but still in histological context, empowering precision diagnostics.