Director of National Cancer Institute discusses future of AI in imaging, cancer care
Officially sworn in this past October as the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Ned Sharpless, MD, believes that artificial intelligence will "probably" be in the future of cancer care.
Sharpless, whose professional experience in cancer research spans across decades, said in a recent interview with STAT News that AI will be most helpful when treating a surplus number of patients or using genomically guided therapy for treatment. Specifically, an AI tool to help radiologists or pathologists to read chest x-rays and other images will most likely be an integral technology in the future of oncology, Sharpless explained.
In terms of the limit AI technology has in cancer care, Sharpless said there doesn't seem to be one yet as he reflected on a recent collaboration with IBM Watson and its machine learning cancer care tool.
"We worked for a while trying to understand genomic data," Sharpless told STAT. We were sequencing patients and trying to decide what to tell them, based on thousands or millions of base pairs of sequencing. IBM came to us and said they had a tool they’d like to train to treat cancer.
Read the entire story below:
A recent graduate from Dominican University (IL) with a bachelor’s in journalism, Melissa joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering all aspects of health imaging. She’s a fan of singing and playing guitar, elephants, a good cup of tea, and her golden retriever Cooper.