Why is it in the news?

• Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH) in Mumbai, India’s largest cancer hospital, has introduced AI with a ‘Bio-Imaging Bank’ for early-stage cancer detection.

Bio-Imaging Bank

• Contains radiology and pathology images along with clinical details, outcome data, treatment specifics, and additional metadata.
• Purposefully designed for training, validation, and rigorous testing of AI algorithms.
• Utilizes deep learning to create a cancer-specific tailored algorithm for early detection.
• It involves data from 60,000 patients.
• Primarily addresses head and neck cancers and lung cancers; Aims for a minimum of 1000 patients for each cancer type.
• Targets tasks like screening for lymph node metastases, nucleus segmentation, classification, and predicting biomarkers (e.g., HPV in oropharyngeal, EGFR in lung cancer).
• Funded collaboratively by the Department of Biotechnology, IIT-Bombay, RGCIRC-New Delhi, AIIMS-New Delhi, and PGIMER-Chandigarh.

AI for Early Cancer Detection

• Analyses radiological and pathological images, learning from extensive datasets to identify unique features associated with different cancers.
• Enables early detection of tissue changes and potential malignancies.
• TMH teams segment and annotate images, correlating them with biopsy results, histopathology reports, and genomic sequences to develop algorithms.

Significance

• AI-driven early diagnosis has demonstrated a 98 percent correctness rate after cross-verification by doctors.
• AI’s potential lies in tailoring treatment approaches based on diverse patient profiles, thus optimizing therapy outcomes.
• Reduces radiation exposure for paediatric patients undergoing CT scans by 40%.