Waterloo: Artificial intelligence (IA) has been developed by engineers at the University of Waterloo to determine whether chemotherapy before surgery would be beneficial for people with breast cancer.
The open-source Cancer-Net initiative’s new artificial intelligence system could help unsuitable candidates avoid the harmful side effects of chemotherapy and improve surgical outcomes for those who are qualified. It is led by Dr. Alexander Wong.
“At this time it is very difficult to determine the appropriate treatment for a given breast cancer patient, and it is crucial to avoid unnecessary side effects from using treatments that are unlikely to have any real benefit for that patient,” said Wong, a professor systems design engineering. .
“An AI system that can help predict whether a patient is likely to respond well to a given treatment gives clinicians the tool to prescribe the best personalized treatment for a patient to improve recovery and survival.”
In a project led by Amy Tai, a graduate student in the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Laboratory, the AI software was trained on images of breast cancer made with a new MRI modality invented by Wong and his team, synthetic call. Correlated Diffusion Imaging (CDI).
Using knowledge gained from CDI images of old breast cancer cases and information about their outcomes, AI can predict whether preoperative chemotherapy treatment would benefit new patients based on their CDI images.
Known as neoadjuvant chemotherapy, pre-surgical treatment can shrink tumors to make surgery possible or easier and reduce the need for major surgery, such as mastectomies.
“I’m quite optimistic about this technology, as deep learning AI has the potential to see and discover patterns that relate to whether a patient will benefit from a given treatment,” said Wong, VIP Lab director and president of research. from Canada. in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging.
