Alibaba Group’s research institute DAMO Academy has developed an AI-powered tool that can screen for early signs of pancreatic cancer, one of the most fatal cancers worldwide.
The tool, dubbed PANDA by researchers, targets pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common type of pancreatic cancer responsible for nearly half a million deaths globally every year, according to estimates.
“AI plus non-contrast CT technology hold the promise to be an effective and cost-efficient tool to achieve detection of pancreatic cancer in the early stages and make large-scale pancreatic cancer screening possible to prevent loss of lives,” said Le Lu, Head of Damo Academy’s medical AI team and a Fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Non-contrast CT scans, the type of image PANDA screens to detect signs of pancreatic cancer. Photo credit: Shutterstock
PANDA is 34.1% more sensitive than radiologists to picking up abnormalities when it comes to screening scans, according to a study published last month by DAMO Academy in collaboration with over 10 medical institutions.
The algorithm was validated in a clinical setting during the screening of over 20,000 patients. While running the tests, PANDA detected pathological changes as a result of pancreatic cancer in 31 patients that doctors had missed.
The deep learning-based model is able to detect cancerous masses in the pancreas by examining non-contrast CT scans, a more efficient form of medical imaging used worldwide with a lower dose of radiation than contrast CT scans.
As well as being more sensitive than technicians, PANDA is also highly specific, meaning it produces very few false positive results. It has one false-positive in every 1,000 tests, outperforming radiologists by 6.3%.
Until now, early-stage detection of pancreatic cancer has been challenging, as symptoms often do not present until cancerous tumors in the organ are already large and spreading to other parts of the body.
But it’s potentially curable if caught early, with up to 10% of patients who receive an early diagnosis making a full recovery after treatment, according to research from Johns Hopkins University.
DAMO Academy’s screening tool can make this ideal scenario a reality by potentially integrating it into routine medical checkups or during visits to emergency departments. PANDA may one day even be able to detect other types of cancer.
“It is possible to envision a future in which AI is used to combine information from routine imaging with information on clinical history,” German medical researchers Jörg Kleeff and Ulrich Ronellenfitsch commented in an article on Nature Medicine.
This article was originally published on Alizila, written by Ivy Yu.
Learn more about Alibaba Cloud Solutions for Healthcare and Life Sciences
875 posts | 198 followers
FollowAlibaba Clouder - April 29, 2020
Alibaba Cloud Community - March 4, 2024
Alibaba Clouder - July 22, 2020
Alibaba Clouder - March 25, 2019
Alibaba Cloud Community - January 13, 2022
Alibaba Clouder - September 20, 2018
875 posts | 198 followers
Follow
AIRec
A high-quality personalized recommendation service for your applications.
Learn More
Artificial Intelligence Service for Conversational Chatbots Solution
This solution provides you with Artificial Intelligence services and allows you to build AI-powered, human-like, conversational, multilingual chatbots over omnichannel to quickly respond to your customers 24/7.
Learn More
Alibaba Cloud Model Studio
A one-stop service platform for whole-process generative AI engineering and application development, based on Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) and other popular models
Learn More
AI Acceleration Solution
Accelerate AI-driven business and AI model training and inference with Alibaba Cloud GPU technology
Learn MoreMore Posts by Alibaba Cloud Community
