The future of medical science indeed looks promising, with artificial intelligence (AI) helping experts in detecting illness with much precision.
The latest being an AI model developed by Mayo Clinic, which can help medical experts in detecting pancreatic cancer from the routine abdominal CT scans of patients up to three years before diagnosis.
This AI model identifies the simplest signs of pancreatic cancer, which is considered to be one of the deadliest cancers because it rarely shows any detectable signs in the early stages.
According to Mayo Clinic, experts used the AI model to analyse nearly 2,000 CT scans, including scans from patients later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which were all originally interpreted as normal. The system, called the Radiomics-based Early Detection Model (REDMOD), identified 73 per cent of those prediagnostic cancers at a median of about 16 months before diagnosis.
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The AI model identified nearly three times as many early cancers, in scans obtained more than two years before diagnosis. These would have otherwise gone undetected.
"This AI can now identify the signature of cancer from a normal-appearing pancreas, and it can do so reliably over time and across diverse clinical settings," said Ajit Goenka, M.D., the study's senior author, and a Mayo Clinic radiologist and nuclear medicine specialist.
Researchers also observed that the model's predictions have been stable over time and run automatically without time-intensive manual preparation. This study also evaluates how clinicians can integrate AI-guided detection into care for patients at elevated risk.
