Swarm Learning AI Program Used to Predict Cancer from Patient Data

An international research team, including medical scientists from the University of Leeds, says it has developed a novel method of using artificial intelligence to predict cancer from patient data without putting personal information at risk. The scientists published their study ("Swarm learning for decentralized artificial intelligence in cancer histopathology") in Nature Medicine. "Artificial intelligence (AI) can predict the presence of molecular alterations directly from routine histopathology slides. However, training robust AI systems requires large datasets for which data collection faces practical, ethical, and legal obstacles. These obstacles could be overcome with swarm learning (SL), in which partners jointly train AI models while avoiding data transfer and monopolistic data governance," write the investigators.