Researchers from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals are using artificial intelligence (AI) to better treat rectal cancer. Doing so can help patients avoid unnecessary and invasive surgeries. It's the first project under a new research center using AI to improve healthcare.
The institutions will apply a $2.78 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) to use AI in analyzing medical images from more than 900 rectal cancer patients. The research will also include data collected in a previous clinical trial of rectal cancer patients.
CWRU’s Dr. Satish Viswanath said the goal is to use AI to help ensure greater accuracy of assessments and greater certainty about whether radiation and chemotherapy have led to cancerous tumor death or significant regression.
“We're able to take the MRI scans through specialized AI algorithms that go in and extract measurements from those scans, which we have shown are associated with response by the body," he said. "The current clinical criteria are not as accurate as they need to be in capturing this kind of information.”