New artificial intelligence tool can accurately identify cancer

Doctors, scientists and researchers have built an artificial intelligence model that can accurately identify cancer in a development they say could speed up diagnosis of the disease and fast-track patients to treatment.

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide. It results in about 10 million deaths annually, or nearly one in six deaths, according to the World Health Organization. In many cases, however, the disease can be cured if detected early and treated swiftly.

The AI tool designed by experts at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Imperial College London can identify whether abnormal growths found on CT scans are cancerous.

The team used CT scans of about 500 patients with large lung nodules to develop an AI algorithm using radiomics. The technique can extract vital information from medical images not easily spotted by the human eye.

The AI model was then tested to determine if it could accurately identify cancerous nodules.

The study used a measure called area under the curve (AUC) to see how effective the model was at predicting cancer. An AUC of 1 indicates a perfect model, while 0.5 would be expected if the model was randomly guessing.

The AI model may also help doctors make quicker decisions about patients with abnormal growths that are currently deemed medium-risk.

When combined with Herder, the AI model was able to identify high-risk patients in this group. It would have suggested early intervention for 18 out of 22 (82%) of the nodules that went on to be confirmed as cancerous, according to the study.

But its potential benefits were clear, they said. Researchers hope the AI tool will eventually be able to speed up the detection of cancer by helping to fast-track patients to treatment, and by streamlining the analysis of CT scans.

The consultant physician in respiratory medicine at the Royal Marsden and team leader at the Institute of Cancer Research said lung cancer was a good example of why new initiatives to speed up detection were urgently needed.

Lung cancer is the biggest worldwide cause of cancer mortality, and accounts for a fifth (21%) of cancer deaths in the UK. Those diagnosed early can be treated much more effectively, but recent data shows more than 60% of lung cancers in England are diagnosed at either stage three or four.