AI Can Predict Pancreatic Cancer Three Years Ahead of Humans

upstart writes:

AI can predict pancreatic cancer three years ahead of humans:

AI algorithms can screen for pancreatic cancer and predict whether patients will develop the disease up to three years before a human doctor can make the same diagnosis, according to research published in Nature on Monday.

Pancreatic cancer is deadly; the five-year survival rate averages 12 percent. Academics working in Denmark and the US believe AI could help clinicians by detecting pancreatic cancer at earlier stages, if the software can reliably predict which patients are at higher risk of developing the disease.

The researchers trained AI algorithms on millions of medical records obtained in the Danish National Patient Registry and the US Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse. The models were trained to correlate diagnosis codes - labels used by hospitals describing different medical conditions - to pancreatic cancer.

[...] "Cancer gradually develops in the human body, often over many years and fairly slowly, until the disease takes hold," Chris Sander, the study's co-senior investigator and leader of a lab working at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, told The Register.

"The AI system attempts to learn from signs in the human body that may relate to such gradual changes."

[...] The most effective model, based on a transformer-based architecture, showed that out of the top 1,000 highest-risk patients over 50, about 320 would go on to develop pancreatic cancer. The model is less accurate when trying to predict pancreatic cancer over longer time intervals compared to shorter ones, and for patients younger than 50.

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