Artificial Intelligence (AI) can predict whether adult patients with brain cancer will survive more than eight months after receiving radiotherapy treatment.
The use of the AI to successfully predict patient outcomes would allow clinicians to be better informed for planning the next stage of treatment and refer patients to potentially life-saving treatment quicker.
This is the first use of AI to predict short-term and long-term survivors within eight-months of radiotherapy.
The paper published recently in Neuro-Oncology shows how researchers from King’s College London created a deep learning model to allow them to more reliably and accurately predict outcomes for patients with adult primary brain cancer.
Glioblastoma is a difficult to treat cancer with just one in four patients surviving more than one year after diagnosis. The researchers applied deep learning – a type of AI - to predict whether glioblastoma patients would survive the eight months after receiving radiotherapy. Eight months is typically the time taken to complete a typical course of routine chemotherapy that usually follows radiotherapy.
Currently, patients are regularly and routinely scanned to see if the chemotherapy is working. But this means that some patients have ineffective chemotherapy which wouldn’t save their life and suffer through harmful side effects.
Instead, by giving an instantaneous and accurate prediction from one routine MRI scan, the AI allows doctors to identify patients who would not benefit from chemotherapy to try a different treatment or start an experimental treatment in a clinical trial.
Dr Thomas Booth, Reader in Neuroimaging at King’s College London and a Neurology Consultant at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This study was motivated by a clinically-attuned and critical research question regarding aggressive brain tumours, and delivered by leveraging cutting edge artificial intelligence. Whilst less common than other cancers, the devastation is disproportionate with a two-year survival rate of 18%.”
Alysha Chelliah, PhD researcher from King’s College London, said: “We applied deep learning to predict whether glioblastoma patients will survive the first eight months after completing radiotherapy. The AI model showed improved performances when first trained to detect abnormalities on 10,000s of brain MRIs. This approach is intended to improve the ability to identify patients who require early second-line treatment or clinical trial enrolment, compared to those showing initial treatment response.”
