EoE is a disease that causes symptoms like chest tightness due to allergic reactions, and has been increased in recent years. Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are used as the first-line treatment, but about 30% of patients do not respond to PPIs, and the pathogenesis of this disease remains unclear. It is important to initiate appropriate treatment before esophageal fibrosis occurs, even in patients who do not respond to PPI, and clarification of the etiology of EoE and the mechanism of PPI responsiveness is strongly required. Therefore, we are working to elucidate the pathogenesis of EoE from histopathological analysis and molecular biological approaches.

Although pathological tissue imaging has become widely used with the advent of virtual slide scanners, the accumulation of knowledge in pathology is vast, and there is still no analytical method that can replace the diagnosis by pathologists. In addition, I am particularly interested in how AI analysis can contribute to histopathological diagnosis. First, I would like to participate in the project team for various histopathological image analyses in the Frontier Medical Engineering Center, and work on the development of AI histopathological diagnosis models that reflect the pathologists' thought process.