Japan, with its declining birthrate and aging population, stands on the verge of a healthcare collapse, both in terms of manpower and economically.

Medical data combined with AI is crucial for “accurate and early diagnosis/treatment,” “alleviating doctor shortages,” “reducing healthcare costs,” and “extending healthy lifespans.” Without this, Japan no longer has a future.
Despite the urgency, Japan lags five years behind leaders in the medical AI field, such as the US, Israel, and South Korea.

The last barrier to the R&D and clinical implementation of medical AI is the lack of medical image data.
It is challenging to collect adequate data for AI training due to 1) different ethical guidelines of hospitals, 2) data variability in imaging equipments, imaging methods, diseases, individual differences, and 3) a significant annotation burden on expert physicians, such as delineating the affected areas.

As a country full of global challenges and thus depicting “the world’s future,” Japan has the world’s highest number of hospital beds and diagnostic imaging units (e.g., MRI and CT scanners) per capita.
If that is the case, then we can turn the adversity in the healthcare field into an advantage by making effective use of the diverse and high-quality medical image data, which mostly remain unused within hospitals, for AI development (as well as for clinical
research/training).
To put it another way, we should be able to save lives globally and boost Japan’s economy through foreign earnings.

With this vision of “the last trump card for Japan’s revival”, I founded Callisto.