Looks like AI isn’t only helpful when writing tedious work emails – some of the world’s leading scientists have used artificial intelligence to make a life-saving prostate cancer discovery.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer to affect men, with 52,000 cases of the disease per year. But the AI revealed that it’s not just one disease – rather, there are two distinct forms.
Led by scientists at the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester, the study applied AI to the data of prostate cancer samples from 159 patients. They were looking for changes in the DNA of these samples, which the scientists obtained using a process known as whole genome sequencing. This is a procedure that maps the unique ‘fingerprint’ of an organism’s DNA.
The AI revealed that there were in fact two distinct cancer groups affecting the patients. That’s because prostate tumours evolve differently from each other and form different versions of the disease. Ultimately, however, they end up converging into two separate ‘branches’ on the evolutionary tree. These branches are known as evotypes.
The scientists confirmed the AI’s results using other mathematical approaches.
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The study, funded by Cancer Research UK and published in journal Cell Genomics, marks the first time researchers have distinguished the disease types of a cancer using AI.
In many cases, prostate cancer is not fatal. The new AI can help diagnose if a patient has a less harmful evotype, which could help them avoid unnecessary treatments – as well as their potential side effects, like incontinence and impotence.
The AI could also soon help doctors deliver tailored treatments according to the results of individual genetic tests.
Co-author Prof Colin Cooper, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School, said: “We hope that the findings will not only save lives through better diagnosis and tailored treatments in the future, but they may help researchers working in other cancer fields better understand other types of cancer too.”
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