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Chemist Turns Software Developer After Son’s Cancer Diagnosis

Photo by Courtesy of Bryan Shaw





This isn't Shaw's field. He's a chemist at Baylor University. But he got involved with leukocoria detection when his newborn son was diagnosed with retinoblastoma in 2008. He and his wife, Elizabeth, had seen leukocoria in baby pictures when Noah was three months old, but at the time the photos were taken they hadn't realized what was going on.



He wondered would have happened if the family camera had been programmed with software that could recognize leukocoria automatically.


And maybe Noah's eye could have been saved.

But there was no software.

Now for most of us, that would have been that. But Bryan, the inorganic chemist, figured what the heck, I'll become a software designer.



Luckily, his wife Elizabeth was quite the shutterbug, so there were thousands of pictures. After poring over them for weeks, Shaw found what he was looking for.


Months before the doctors diagnosed his cancer these photos showed the tumors were there and growing when Noah was practically a newborn. "I mean he still had the nasty thing hanging from his belly button," Shaw says.

Using the picture, Shaw developed a scale for how much leukocoria there was in a particular picture. He's rounded up some computer science colleagues at Baylor, including George Hamerly, Ryan Henning, Pablo Rivas-Perea and Li Guoand. Together they've come up with a software prototype.


But getting the kind of distribution Shaw's hoping for is going to take a while, because perfecting the software and proving it works are going to be tough.

One thing he'll definitely need is help from parents of children with retinoblastoma. They'll have to donate all their baby pictures so he can test his software on those and see how it does finding their cancers.

And he'll need pictures of healthy kids to prove the software won't accidentally say they have cancer, when they don't. "False positives," says Shaw. "That's going to be the big problem is false positives."



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