AI tool shows promise for treating brain cancer.
Scientists have created an artificial intelligence tool that has the potential to aid doctors in the treatment of aggressive brain tumours by identifying traits that direct surgery.
Harvard Medical School (HMS) scientists have developed this AI tool for swift DNA decoding of brain tumours during surgery.
The tool, called CHARM (Cryosection Histopathology Assessment and Review Machine), is freely available to other researchers.
The charm tool studies images to quickly pick out the genetic profile of a kind of tumour called glioma, a process that currently takes days or weeks, said Kun-Hsing Yu, senior author of a report released Friday in the journal Med.
Surgeons use detailed diagnoses to guide them while they operate, Yu said, and the ability to get them rapidly could improve patients' outcomes and spare them from multiple surgeries.
It still has to be clinically validated through testing in real-world settings and cleared by the FDA before deployment in hospitals, the research team said.
"Right now, even state-of-the-art clinical practice cannot profile tumours molecularly during surgery. Our tool overcomes this challenge by extracting thus-far untapped biomedical signals from frozen pathology slides," said study senior author Kun-Hsing Yu, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.
Knowing a tumour's molecular identity during surgery is also valuable because certain tumours benefit from on-the-spot treatment with drug-coated wafers placed directly into the brain at the time of the operation, Yu said.
"The ability to determine intraoperative molecular diagnosis in real time, during surgery, can propel the development of real-time precision oncology," Yu added.