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An artificial intelligence (AI) tool has identified people at the highest risk of pancreatic cancer up to three years before diagnosis using just the patients’ medical records, according to Harvard Medical School.
Pancreatic cancer is quite rare compared to other cancers yet despite this, it is the third-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, according to the University of Utah. One of the main reasons pancreatic cancer is so deadly is that it is often diagnosed late.
The new research study which used the AI tool is led by investigators at Harvard Medical School and the University of Copenhagen. The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine on Monday. The tool could potentially speed up the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, which is often discovered at advanced stages when it is much more difficult to treat, according to researchers.
“One of the most important decisions clinicians face day-to-day is who is at high risk for a disease and who would benefit from further testing, which can also mean more invasive and more expensive procedures that carry their own risks,” said study co-author Chris Sander in a press statement. Sander is a faculty member in the Department of Systems Biology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School.
According to Sander, an AI tool like the one used by researchers would let medical professionals “zero in” on those with the highest risk for pancreatic cancer. Based on this, they will understand who would benefit the most from tests, helping them improve their clinical decision-making.
In the study, the researchers trained the AI algorithm on two separate data sets, including 9 million patient records from Denmark and the United States. They “asked” the model to look for indicative signs of pancreatic cancer in the records.
Based on the data, the model was able to predict which patients are likely to develop pancreatic cancer in the future. Interestingly, many of the symptoms were not directly related to or did not originate from the pancreas.
The study tested different versions of the AI models. These versions were designed with the ability to detect people with increased risk of pancreatic cancer in different time scales. Namely, those with a high risk for developing cancer in six months, one year, two years and three years.
According to the researchers, each version of the model was at least as accurate at predicting the disease as genetic sequencing tools that currently are typically only available for a small subset of patients in data sets.
You can screen for prostate cancer with a specific blood test and breast cancer with a mammogram. Similarly, a pap smear can be used to screen for cervix cancer. But pancreatic cancer, especially by comparison, is much more expensive to screen and test for, according to Harvard Medical School.
In some cases where pancreatic cancer is suspected, doctors could be cautious about recommending the expensive tests required to detect it, like CT scans, MRIs and endoscopic ultrasound imaging.
Even if “lesions” are discovered using these test methods, patients will have to go through a biopsy so that doctors can study the tissue further to confirm if it is cancerous or not. But the pancreas is deep inside the abdomen and it is difficult to access, easy to provoke and inflame. According to the medical school, the pancreas is known as the “angry organ” due to its irritability.
The new AI tool might make it possible to “screen” patients for future risk of pancreatic cancer, provided they have health records and medical history available. According to the researchers, this is especially important because many patients at high risk may not even be aware about the fact that they are at a high risk of pancreatic cancer.
