Good news and this one in the field of medicine – cancer research! A study was recently published in “here”. Yeah, I guessed it, it might be challenging to understand these highly researched papers, and so I am here to break it down for you.

Before that do you know what histopathology images are? Ok, histopathology is microscopic examination of tissues. This helps in diagnosing and study further about the disease. So, histopathology images, are yes, you guessed it right, the microscopic images of tissues.

The researchers of this study have introduced an approach which could give detailed insights in recommending treatments for the cancer patients. Traditionally, this involves RNA Sequencing, a time-consuming process. Yeah yeah, I know medical terms. Well in simple words, RNA Sequencing allows scientists to understand the biology of cells by knowing the total cellular count of RNA’s. This in turn helps in indicating any disease. Let’s not dive deeper, but just know this, it gives vital information and is an expensive technique.

Mainly, you know how crucial is time in treating patients. To bypass all this, they developed a machine learning algorithm which analyse images of tumours and recommend treatments faster than RNA-Seq. This is Deep-PT (Deep Pathology for Transciptomics). Then the output from Deep-PT is fed into another program, called ENLIGHT, which then enlightens on the best treatment.

What the researches say is that ENLIGHT DEEP-PT (the actual name of the combined program), was tested on five different groups of patients who had six types of cancer, receiving four different treatments. The predictions were reliable as patients who were likely responders had about 2.28 times higher chances of responding well compared to the rest.  

This advancement of AI in medical purposes is incredible. Hopefully, in the coming days AI will be put to more good use cases that are actually life-saving. Do stay away from any fake news as the one about head transplant.

^{Featured Image also by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash}