![]() ![]() “Training the data to identify food takes a long time and is very laborious,” he noted. The two soon began to collaborate.Ĭacchione noted that, months into the development, the team has passed its biggest hurdle: training the data. In 2019, he learned of Cacchione’s involvement as director of Innovate, a group which supports and implements innovative technology initiatives across the University, and reached out via email as his idea began to take shape. The assistance prompted him later, when he was in residency, to build out a patent for an idea that you could take the camera view, whether augmented or mixed reality, and send the information visually to a processor for the computer to then generate meaningful information. His roommate, a software engineer, offered to write script to automate the process. “My job was to do this for 40 hours a week, and the project would take a year,” Jin remembered. His supposition was motivated in large part by his initial medical research project years ago where he was tasked with counting the number of dots that showed up on a slide, which represented the number of axons, or nerve fibers, in a cell. Jin sensed that emerging technologies could improve and accelerate the process to quantify and qualify diet. “And the most common questions we would get from patients in our clinic was: ‘Does diet impact my recovery?’ ‘Is there anything I shouldn’t be eating?’ ” Yet you and I know that it’s hard to remember what you ate yesterday, last week, let alone last month,” Jin said. “The way the research is normally done is that you ask for dietary recalls. Yet as a researcher, he was less than satisfied with the existing methodologies. “I’ve been super interested for a long time in understanding how diet and exercise-both modifiable behaviors-impact prostate cancer incidence and development and the way they respond to treatment,” said Jin, a radiation oncologist specialist. Mahal credited Jin with generating the original idea. “This has immense potential for our community and the patients we serve.” “This app can help us capture folks’ diets and to assess which diets might be potentially healthy and protective against certain kinds of cancer and others that might increase risk factor and tend toward adverse outcomes,” explained Mahal. Brandon Mahal, a cancer specialist who serves as assistant director for community outreach with Sylvester, teamed with Max Cacchione, director of innovation with University of Miami Information Technology, and several student researchers during the past six months to develop the “Calorie Checker: An Image Analysis App for Caloric Estimation in Real Time.” ![]() William Jin, a staff physician with the University of Miami Medical Group, and Dr. The “digital assistant to estimate caloric intake” app, developed and powered by artificial intelligence protocols, holds tremendous promise to resolve this dilemma and improve patients’ recovery. Yet despite their eagerness to help, when asked to monitor their critical food intake, patients are often at a loss to remember in detail and fail to chart consistently. One of the first questions cancer patients ask of their doctors is what they can do-especially in terms of modifying diet-to support their recovery. ![]()
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