Over 90 Total Lots Up For Auction at One Location - WA 04/08

New AI tech for early detection of prostate cancer

Press releases may be edited for formatting or style | July 08, 2021 Artificial Intelligence CT X-Ray
Prostate cancer is the most diagnosed cancer and a leading cause of death by cancer in Australian men.

Early detection is key to successful treatment but men often dodge the doctor, avoiding diagnosis tests until it's too late.

Now an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia could catch the disease earlier, allowing for incidental detection through routine computed tomography (CT) scans.
stats
DOTmed text ad

New Fully Configured 80-slice CT in 2 weeks with Software Upgrades for Life

For those who need to move fast and expand clinical capabilities -- and would love new equipment -- the uCT 550 Advance offers a new fully configured 80-slice CT in up to 2 weeks with routine maintenance and parts and Software Upgrades for Life™ included.

stats
The tech, developed in collaboration with clinicians at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne, works by analysing CT scans for tell-tale signs of prostate cancer, something even a well-trained human eye struggles to do.

CT imaging is not suitable for regular cancer screening because of the high radiation doses involved, but the AI solution could be used to run a cancer check whenever men have their abdomen or pelvis scanned for other issues.

RMIT's Dr Ruwan Tennakoon said CT scans were great for detecting bone and joint problems but even radiologists struggled to spot prostate cancers on the images.

"We've trained our software to see what the human eye can't, with the aim of spotting prostate cancer through incidental detection," he said.

"It's like training a sniffer dog - we can teach the AI to see things that we can't with our own eyes, in the same way a dog can smell things human noses can't."

Prostate cancer is slow growing and is usually detected incidentally, so can go undiagnosed for years. In 2020, it was responsible for an estimated 12% of male cancer deaths in Australia.

*How it works*

For the study, published in Nature's Scientific Reports, researchers from RMIT and St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne studied CT scans of asymptomatic patients, with and without prostate cancer.

The team trained the AI software to look for features of disease in a variety of scans and where exactly to look for them, avoiding the need to manually crop the images.

The AI performed better than radiologists who viewed the same images, detecting cancerous growths in just seconds.

What's more, the AI improved with each scan, learning and adapting to read images from different machines to spot even the smallest irregularities.

RMIT's Head of Artificial Intelligence, Professor John Thangarajah, said the study demonstrated how AI can and should be used to create public good.

"Our health sector needs smarter solutions and AI can help, but we're only scratching the surface," he said.

"There's a lot of good that artificial intelligence can bring to the world, which is our focus at RMIT, and this study forms a big part of that."

You Must Be Logged In To Post A Comment