Faster and better cancer diagnosis with artificial intelligence

The powerful technology, developed by a team led by engineering researchers at the University of Waterloo, uses digital images of tissue samples to match new cases of suspected cancer with previously diagnosed cases in a database. In tests using the largest publicly available archive in the world – comprised of about 30,000 digitized slides from almost 11,000 patients – the technology achieved up to 100-per-cent accuracy for 32 forms of cancer in 25 organs and body parts. "AI can help us tap into our medical wisdom, which at the moment is just sitting in archives," said Hamid Tizhoosh, director of the Laboratory for Knowledge Inference in Medical Image Analysis (KIMIA Lab) at Waterloo. "When you use AI like this, its performance is astounding." The system utilizes AI to search digital images of biopsies from confirmed cancer cases for those most similar to a new digital image in an undiagnosed case.