According to a report in the Guardian, a team of scientists, doctors, and researchers have developed an AI model that accurately identifies cancer.
The AI tool has been created by experts at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Imperial College London, and is said to perform more efficiently and effectively than current methods. By analyzing CT scans, the tool can identify whether abnormal growths are cancerous, which could help speed up the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.
Dr Benjamin Hunter, a clinical research fellow at Imperial and a clinical oncology registrar at the Royal Marsden, hopes that this tool will improve early detection and potentially lead to more successful cancer treatment by identifying high-risk patients and fast-tracking them to earlier intervention. The research’s findings have been published in the ebiomedicine journal of the Lancet.
The researchers used CT scans of around 500 patients who had large lung nodules to create an AI algorithm based on radiomics. This technique can extract essential information from medical images that may not be easily detectable by the human eye.
To evaluate the AI model’s effectiveness in anticipating cancer, the study employed a metric called area under the curve (AUC). A perfect model would have an AUC of 1, while a random-guessing model would have an AUC of 0.5.
The results revealed that the AI model could identify the cancer risk of each nodule with an AUC score of 0.87, which is better than the clinic’s Brock score of 0.67. Mr Hunter further added that based on the preliminary results, the model appears to precisely detect cancerous lung nodules.
Moving forward, the researchers plan to test the AI technology’s ability to predict lung cancer risk accurately on patients with large lung nodules in a clinical setting. The chief investigator of the Libra study, Dr Richard Lee, hopes to use innovative technologies such as AI to accelerate the detection of the disease and push boundaries.
Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide and results in about 10 million deaths annually, accounting for nearly one in six deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
