AI Discovers Misshapen Cells in Ovarian Cancer Patients That Present New Drug Targets

Artificial intelligence technology has an established home in drug design for many developers. Now, researchers are seeing it as a potential tool in driving therapeutic choices in the treatment of ovarian cancer. Researchers in the United Kingdom used artificial intelligence technology to analyze tissue samples of 514 ovarian cancer patients. The AI technology was used to carefully identify and track the shape of about 150 million different cells in total, Forbes reported. Yinyin Yuan, the team leader in computational pathology at the Institute for Cancer Research, said the AI was used to identify the types of cancer cells found within the patients. The identification of the cancer cells will allow doctors to tailor the most precise treatment for cancer patients. As Forbes reported, artificial intelligence technology was able to scan the shape and content of the cells within the tumor. The technology particularly primarily focused on the nuclei and discovered some anomalies. In most cases, Forbes reported, the nuclei of cells are round, or a bit oblong. However, the artificial intelligence scan revealed there were “small patches with misshapen nuclei” in some of the ovarian tumor samples. The women who had these patches had an aggressive form of the disease with limited survivability. Those particular cancer patients had a 15 percent five-year survival rate, compared to 53 percent of the cancer patients without the misshapen nuclei.