Outsmarting Cancer in the Age of AI: AI is dramatically shortening the timing and improving…

Physical exercise had always been one of her daily “must-dos,” and Gina set out on her daily seven-mile walk with her walking buddy. Each day, they met for coffee, had a quick gab about what was new or exciting, and began the walk to the next town and back again.

Exercising as she did, one had to wonder why she had such firm, exercise-induced legs and calf muscles, but her stomach never seemed to go down. Her waistline was out of proportion to the rest of her body.

But Gina didn’t give it a second thought. She felt fine, was in a great relationship that would lead to marriage, and she was happy with her job. What could be wrong?

Today there was something wrong; pain in her stomach. Had she eaten something the night before, or was it that cocktail she tried at the birthday party for her fiance? Healthy as she was, it couldn’t have been anything; it was. Gina’s life was about to be turned upside down.

I didn’t see her for a month or more, and when I did, there was a decidedly different Gina. Her face was drawn, her mood didn’t have that “who cares” look, and her eyes pierced into mine. “I have cancer,” she said, trying not to cry.

Gina didn’t have a small cancerous growth. The tumors, the ones that made her stomach bulge, were numerous and spreading, jumping around her liver and her intestines, planting new tumors. The pain was the first indication she had. But her’s wasn’t the prime cancer killer. She did smoke, but lung cancer wasn’t part of her problem.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has estimated that, in both sexes, lung cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death around the world. Detecting lung cancer has become a prime area of interest for the medical community. A new detection weapon had to be found to diagnose it earlier.

AI is providing more accurate cancer diagnoses and recognizing patterns through the interpretation of images and medical scans quicker. Computers are training in the detection of patterns following a cancer algorithms that enable the AI to become better at interpreting what the images present.

Researchers at Google and several medical centers have engaged in vigorous efforts to help pathologists read microscopic slides to diagnose cancer and to help ophthalmologists detect eye disease and persons with diabetes. “We have some of the biggest computers in the world,” said Dr. Daniel TSC, a project manager at Google. “We started wanting to push the boundaries of basic science to find interesting and cool applications to work on.” The “coolness” of cancer fueled interest in projecting AI as a prime hunter for cancer detection.

Lung cancer, which killed an estimated 160,000 persons in the US in 2018, is one of these prime targets of new AI technology. The American Lung Association has indicated that “approximately 541,000 Americans living today have been diagnosed with lung cancer at some point in their life.” During 2018, an estimated 234,030 new cases were expected to be diagnosed.

Primarily a disease of the elderly, 86% of those living with cancer in 2015 were 60 years of age or older.

“Tested against 6,716 caseswith known diagnoses, the system was 94 percent accurate. Pitted against six expert radiologists, when no prior scan was available, the deep learning model beat the doctors. It had fewer false positives and false negatives. When an earlier scan was available, the system and the doctors were neck and neck.