AI speeding up radiotherapy preparation

A leading British hospital group has successfully applied artificial intelligence to clinical tasks aimed at cutting cancer care waiting times, it has been announced.

The technology is currently in use for prostate and head and neck cancer treatment, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, said.

Doctors are using AI to help plan radiotherapy – and this has made the task two and a half times faster than previously, the hospital said.

Oncologist Dr Raj Jena has been working with Microsoft on the project as part of “Project InnerEye”.

This allowed him to create a specific AI tool, OSAIRIS, which can undertake the work of outlining organs before radiotherapy, a task which can take a doctor up to three hours.

The developers say the results have been tested in “masked” trials and judged to be good as the work of experienced doctors. The hospital has received £500,000 in Government funding to develop the work.

Dr Jena said: “OSAIRIS does much of the work in the background so that when the doctor sits down to start planning treatment, most of the heavy lifting is done. It is the first cloud-based AI technology to be developed and deployed within the NHS. Having carried out 18 months of rigorous testing, we are now able to share this technology safely across the NHS for patient benefit.

“We’ve already started to work on a model that works in the chest, so that will work for lung cancer and breast cancer particularly. And also, from my perspective as a neuro-oncologist, I’m interested that we’re building the brain model as well so that we’ve got something that works for brain tumours too.”

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