#127 Reinventing Prostate Cancer Testing with AI: From Development to Regulation to Production with Elliot Smith – CEO & Founder

Elliot Smith is the CEO and founder of Maxwell Plus. A visionary company that has been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help treat and diagnose patients with prostate cancer. The way they bring in the data, help analyze it and help people along their journey is fascinating and makes them leaders in this specific field.

Elliot is very passionate about helping others find diseases at a point where they can be treated. To know where things are, if they should be treated and how best to treat them is his ultimate goal in terms of applying data science and AI to the medical world.

Stay tuned to know how his desire to build something that could be useful in the real world turned into a company with the potential of impacting the lives of over 300 million men that have or are being diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Quotes:

• When I finished that I sort of came to the realisation that I loved academia, but it was a little bit too slow moving for me. I wanted to be out there building things, putting stuff out into the world and decided to have another run at building a start-up and at the time I happened to know a lot about numerical modelling, optimisation and how that translated into things like AI and also medical imaging and without jumping too far ahead that's the point where all of this came together and the company that I now run Maxwell plus was born in that collision of worlds.
• We looked at their data, we saw something in their data that wouldn't have been picked up otherwise and our doctors said we need to act and with the hindsight of knowing their outcomes we acted at the right time and those people have what is for prostate cancer is 98% 5 year survival rate because we acted in time to avoid that conversation.
• If you have had treatment or you choose to go into what is called active surveillance, which is let’s just watch this and determine when to treat, the algorithm that we apply to do initial diagnosis apply just as well to monitoring your diagnosis over time. How can we then go to provide ongoing support to really see these men through from day one to day infinity and continue to provide real clinical value to these men.
  

Read the full episode summary here: Episode #127

Enjoy the show!