Cancer Screening For All – An Electrical Engineer’s Approach

Abstract

Early detection is one of the best weapons in the fight against cancer. To detect it early, you have to screen for it before symptoms appear. For such screening to be effective, you need a test that is: i) reliable, ii) low-cost, iii) performed on a regular basis, iv) easy to use, v) able to detect majority of cancers, and vi) it requires a small amount of sample. To accomplish that, one has to work at the intersection of biology, electronics, biochemistry, signal processing, sensors, microfluidics, mechanical design, software, electrochemistry, system engineering, connectivity, and FDA regulatory requirements. It is a significant multidisciplinary effort and quite a bit of fun at the same time! This talk is an attempt to outline an electrical engineer’s approach and passion towards creating a $50 home test cartridge for early detection of majority of cancers that works much like the Covid home test the entire world is familiar with. It was all triggered by a personal tragedy and one that occurs to millions of families across the world every year.

Bio 

Mehdi Hatamian is currently the CEO of 2Pi-Sigma Corporation, a biomedical company he founded to work on next-generation cancer screening devices and technologies. Prior to founding this company, he has worked with NASA, Bell Labs, Silicon Design Experts Inc., and most recently Broadcom, where he was Sr. VP of Engineering. 

Hatamian’s areas of expertise are high-speed VLSI signal processing, full-custom and low-power integrated circuit design, image processing and compression, adaptive filtering, Ethernet transceiver design, high-density and high-speed CMOS design, high temperature superconductors, and biomedical electronics.

He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the development of integrated circuits for video, communications, and digital signal processing, and he is a Life Fellow of IEEE. He holds 175 patents, with more than 90% of them used in products worldwide.

Hatamian received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He is a recipient of the CoE Alumni Merit Award for ECE.