A new artificial intelligence tool promoted by the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona will facilitate the diagnosis of prostate cancer based on magnetic resonance imaging, which will affect the treatment of each case. The easy-to-use instrument is now available to all professionals.
Early and accurate diagnosis is essential to increase survival rates in a type of cancer such as prostate cancer, which this year will present 30,000 new cases in Spain and represents 15% of all diagnosed tumors, according to calculations by the Spanish Society of Oncology. Medical.
As a result of this high incidence, the Hospital Clínic requested four years ago that prostate tumors be incorporated into the European project Incisive, funded by the EU, to create AI services to support the diagnosis of lung, colorectal and breast cancer.
We started 4 years ago, when many people thought that AI was a false expectation”
“The prostate, in terms of incidence, mortality and social impact, is the male breast cancer, at the moment it was included in the Incisive project at our request because they saw that otherwise gender discrimination would occur,” explained Antonio Alcaraz. , head of the urology service at the Clínic.
Four years later, the instrument is in operation. A federated data repository has been created with more than 3.7 million medical images, in addition to associated clinical data, from more than 9,000 patients. AI acts on this database to enhance the analysis of MRI images related to the diagnosis, prediction and monitoring of prostate cancer.
The developed algorithms focus on patient prioritization, lesion localization and segmentation, cancer diagnosis and stage, and metastasis risk.
A prostate cancer cell seen under a microscope
Access to the tool is universal and very simple to use: after registration, the professional uploads an MRI image to the system and receives a report that indicates whether the patient is going to develop cancer. “This report explains the different modules that the AI has processed and the probability that the patient has a tumor, as well as whether it is a significant or non-significant tumor, and reports on the aggressiveness of the tumor,” explains researcher Lourdes. Mengual.
The procedure for diagnosing the tumor involves performing an MRI if there is suspicion – normally detected by PSA levels through blood tests – and a biopsy on the identified lesions. “But the resonance is not one hundred percent reliable. There are dubious images, images that cannot be seen due to their tiny size,” says Carles Nicolau, head of radiology at the Clínic. “This AI tool helps us detect lesions that were not visible to the human eye, based on many MRIs that have a definitive diagnosis.”
The Incisive project has brought together 26 European partners from 9 countries; the Clínic is the only Spanish hospital included
Although there are still no studies on the effectiveness of the system, in a personal estimate Antonio Alcaraz believes that the diagnosis will improve by around 20%. In his opinion, the tool “democratizes patient care anywhere in the world” and is especially useful for radiologists who do not address a specific type but a variety of tumors.
“We started four years ago, when many people thought AI was fer fly coloms (a false expectation). Now it is here to stay, it is going to be a change at least as revolutionary as the internet was. Medicine is going to change radically, and it is going to reach surgery,” emphasizes Alcaraz, head of the Idibaps research group in genetics and urological tumors.
Doctors Nicolau, Mengual, Alcaraz and Rosa Ramos
The Incisive project has brought together 26 partners (academic, industrial, hospital centers) from 9 European countries. In addition to the Clínic, in Spain the TIC Salut social foundation, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Medtronic Ibérica have participated, and have received funding of 10 million euros.
The systematized repository of millions of medical images and associated clinical data that Incisive has billed will be incorporated into a larger community project that is underway, Eucaim (European Oncology Imaging Initiative), which seeks to foster innovation and the deployment of digital technologies in cancer treatment and care to achieve more accurate and faster clinical decision making, diagnoses, treatments and predictive medicine.
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