Google Health and Mayo Clinic Using AI to Further Cancer Treatment Research

There is no denying that artificial intelligence is the future and it is slowly making things better and better in every walk of life. The latest news we are hearing about the use of AI is in the field of healthcare and medicine where Google Health and Mayo Clinic have started exploring how they can use artificial intelligence during the cancer radiotherapy treatment process.

According to Google, AI could actually help speed up the time consuming and mental preparation that is needed for radiotherapy treatment, which happens to be one of the most common cancer treatments that are used to treat over half the cancer patients in the United States.

Google Health and Mayo Clinic Are Now Looking into Ways of Using AI to Help Speed Up the Cancer Treatment Research

This is an excerpt from the official statement,

The most labor-intensive step in planning is a technique called “contouring” which involves segmenting both the areas of cancer and nearby healthy tissues that are susceptible to radiation damage during treatment. Clinicians have to painstakingly draw lines around sensitive organs on scans—a time-intensive process that can take up to seven hours for a single patient.

Google’s health division is working with Mayo Clinic to research and develop an AI system that is going to support physicians, it will also help reduce the time it takes for the planning, and will also improve the efficiency of radiotherapy. There is going to be an algorithm which is going to assist the hospital staff in contouring healthy tissue and organs from tumours. Research is also going to be conducted n how effective it will be in real-world applications. Google Health and Mayo Clinic are specifically focusing on head and neck cancers that are especially difficult to contour.

In this first phase of research with Mayo Clinic, we hope to develop and validate a model as well as study how an AI system could be deployed in practice. The technology will not be used in a clinical setting and algorithms will be developed using only de-identified data.

Google is hoping that the research is going to support a faster planning process and potentially help the patients to have the access to the treatment sooner.

The post Google Health and Mayo Clinic Using AI to Further Cancer Treatment Research by Furqan Shahid appeared first on Wccftech.