AI can make sure cancer patients get just enough (but not too much) treatment

Patients with glioblastoma, a malignant tumor in the brain or spinal cord, typically live no more than five years after receiving their diagnosis. And those five years can be painful -- in an effort to minimize the tumor, doctors often prescribe a combination of radiation therapy and drugs that can cause debilitating side effects for patients. Now, researchers from MIT Media Lab have developed artificial intelligence (AI) that can determine the minimum drug doses needed to effectively shrink glioblastoma patients' tumors. They plan to present their research at Stanford University's 2018 Machine Learning for Healthcare conference. To create an AI that could determine the best dosing regimen for glioblastoma patients, the MIT researchers turned to a training technique known as reinforcement learning (RL). First, they created a testing group of 50 simulated glioblastoma patients based on a large dataset of those that had previously undergone treatment for their disease.