AI to defeat cancer? Doctors create AI tool that can detect disease

An artificial intelligence (AI) model has been created by scientists, doctors and researchers that can accurately identify cancer, marking a development milestone that can speed up diagnosis of the deadly disease and also speed up treatment for patients. patients.

Cancer has become one of the leading causes of multiple deaths worldwide, resulting in around 10 million deaths each year, or one in six deaths, according to the World Health Organization report.

However, in many cases, cancer can be cured and lives can be saved if detected early and prompt treatment is provided to patients.

Experts from the Royal Marsden NHS trust, Imperial College London and the Institute of Cancer Research London have designed the AI ​​tool that can identify whether the abnormal growths seen on CT scans of a person are cancerous.

According to the study, the performance of the algorithm was more efficient and effective compared to current methods. The research results have been published in the Lancet journal eBioMedicine.

“In the future, we hope this will improve early detection and potentially make cancer treatment more effective by highlighting high-risk patients and quickly directing them to earlier intervention,” said Dr Benjamin Hunter. , an Imperial Oil clinical researcher and clinical oncologist. clerk who works at the Royal Marsden.

The research team used CT scans of around 500 patients who had large lung nodules to create an AI algorithm using radiomics. Using this technique, vital information can be extracted from medical images that the human eye cannot easily spot.

A measure, called the area under the curve (AUC), was used in the study to test the model’s effectiveness in predicting cancer.

If a model gets an AUC of 1, it will be counted, with 0.5 indicating it is guessing randomly. The results of the study showed that the cancer risk in each nodule can be identified by the AI ​​model with an AUC of 0.87.

“Based on these early results, our model appears to accurately identify large cancerous lung nodules,” Hunter said. “Next, we plan to test the technology on patients with large lung nodules in the clinic to see if it can accurately predict their risk of lung cancer,” he added.

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The chief investigator of the Libra study, Dr. Richard Lee, said: “Through this work, we hope to push the boundaries to accelerate disease detection using innovative technologies such as AI.

Speaking of lung cancer which is considered the leading cause of cancer death, Lee said: “People diagnosed with lung cancer at the earliest stage are much more likely to survive for five years compared to those whose cancer is detected late. This means that finding ways to speed up the detection of the disease is a priority, and this study – which is the first to develop a radiomics model specifically focused on large lung nodules – could one day help clinicians identify the high-risk patients. .”

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