Healthcare industry and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence, an area focusing on the creation of intelligent machines, is gaining increased recognition in the healthcare industry. Cancer, one of the leading causes of many deaths, is a major national concern. Also, expenditures are higher for Cancer as compared to other diseases. Cancer is a complex and uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body. The ever-changing nature of tumours is one of the biggest challenges in treating cancer. Scientists are making use of Artificial Intelligence to predict how cancers will progress and evolve. A team led by the Institute of Cancer Research London (ICR) and the University of Edinburgh developed a new technique known as Revolver (Repeated Evolution of Cancer). This picks out patterns in DNA mutation within cancers and uses the information to forecast future genetic changes.

If medical professionals can predict how a tumour (even harmless one) will evolve and grow, they could take a proactive approach in controlling the Cancer before it reaches its advanced stage. The chances of survival for a patient would increase dramatically by incorporating AI into cancer growth. The researchers developed a new machine learning technique which transfers knowledge about tumours across similar patients. This method detects patterns in the order that genetic changes occur in tumours that are repeated both within and between patients’ tumours, applying one tumour’s pattern of mutations to predict another’s.

If tumours with certain patterns are found to develop resistance to a particular treatment, AI could be used to predict if patients will develop resistance in the future. This new approach using AI could allow treatment to be more personalized at an earlier stage than is currently possible, tailoring it to the characteristics of each individual tumour. It will also help predict how tumour will look like in the future.