A new artificial intelligence (AI) technology can now predict if chemotherapy will work best for a woman with breast cancer.
AI Algorithm For Breast Cancer Chemotherapy Effectiveness Prediction
Engineers at the University of Waterloo designed an AI algorithm to help doctors decide if the patient is suitable for chemotherapy to avoid serious side effects. The project is part of the open-source Cancer-Net initiative led by Dr. Alexander Wong.
Determining the appropriate treatment for a given breast cancer patient is extremely difficult at the moment, and it is crucial to avoid unnecessary side effects from using treatments that are unlikely to have real benefit for that patient, Wong said, per EurekAlert!
An AI system that can help predict whether a patient will respond favorably to a given treatment and assist physicians with the means to prescribe the most effective personalized treatment for the patient, thereby enhancing their chances of recovery and survival.
How Did They Design The New AI Algorithm For Breast Cancer
In a project directed by Amy Tai, a graduate student in the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab, AI software was trained with breast cancer images created with a new magnetic resonance imaging modality, synthetic correlated diffusion imaging, developed by Wong and his team (CDI)
With knowledge gleaned from CDI images of historical breast cancer cases and information on their outcomes, the AI can predict whether pre-operative chemotherapy treatment would be beneficial for new patients based on their CDI images.
The pre-surgical treatment, known as neoadjuvant chemotherapy, can shrink tumors to make surgery possible or easier and reduce the need for major operations such as mastectomies.
Wong, director of the VIP Lab and Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging, said he was confident with the technology because deep-learning AI has the potential to see and discover patterns that indicate whether a patient will benefit from a given treatment.
Through the Cancer-Net initiative, the new AI algorithm and the complete dataset of breast cancer CDI images have been made available to the public so that other researchers can advance the field.
What is Breast Cancer?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), breast cancer is a disease when cells in the breasts grow out of control. There are different kinds of breast cancer, depending on which cells turn into cancer.
Breast cancer can spread outside the breast through blood vessels and lymph vessels. When they spread to other body parts, it is said to have metastasized.
In 2022, there were 287, 850 new cases of invasive breast cancer were diagnosed among US women, according to ACS Journals. It predicted that 43, 250 women would die from the disease.
Eighty-three percent of invasive breast cancers are diagnosed among women aged 50 and 91% of death occur in the said group.
Check out more news and information on Artificial Intelligence and Breast Cancer in Science Times.
