Artificial Intelligence Optimizes Chemo and Radiotherapy to Treat Glioblastomas

Patients with glioblastoma, a persistent and difficult to treat brain cancer, often end up suffering through multiple rounds of chemo and radiation therapy. Scientists at MIT have been working on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to better optimize the therapy dosages, sparing the patients the brunt of the treatments while maintaining their clinical effectiveness. Their software, which uses a technique called reinforced learning, assesses different data points about a given patient and uses information obtained from thousands of previous similar cases to produce a treatment plan that is better optimized than existing regimens. So far the technology has been tested in silico on virtual patients, pointing to significant reductions in dosage levels while maintaining the ability to reduce the size of tumors.