The new AI tool, called Sybil, was developed by scientists at the Mass General Cancer Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In one study, it was shown to accurately predict whether a person will develop lung cancer in the next year 86% to 94% of the time. (...)
The tool, experts say, could be a leap forward in the early detection of lung cancer, the third most common cancer in the United States, according to the CDC. The disease is the leading cause of cancer death, according to the American Cancer Society, which estimates that this year there will be more than 238,000 new cases of lung cancer and more than 127,000 deaths.
There are more than 300 AI tools approved by the FDA for use in radiology, according to Anant Madabhushi, a professor in the department of biomedical engineering at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. Most are used to assist doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, he said, but not for predicting someone’s future cancer risk, like Sybil does.
Sybil looks for signs of where cancer is likely to turn up, so doctors know where to look and can then spot it as early as possible. (...)
To predict cancer risk, Sybil relies on a single CT scan. It analyzes the three-dimensional image, looking for not only signs of abnormal growth in the lungs, but also other patterns or nuisances that scientists don’t fully understand yet, said Dr. Florian Fintelmann, a radiologist at Mass General Cancer Center and one of the researchers working on Sybil.
Based on what it sees, Sybil provides predictions for whether a person will develop lung cancer in the next one to six years, he said.
There have been cases, Fintelmann added, where Sybil has detected signs of cancers that radiologists did not detect until nodules were visible on a CT scan years later.
by Berkeley Lovelace Jr. and John Torres, M.D. and Marina Kopf and Patrick Martin, NBC News | Read more:
Image: NBC News
[ed. Technological advances like these help explain: How 90 Became the New 60 (NYT).]
