Using artificial intelligence to determine whether immunotherapy is working

And, once again, they're doing it by teaching a computer to find previously unseen changes in patterns in CT scans taken when the lung cancer is first diagnosed compared to scans taken after the first 2-3 cycles of immunotherapy treatment. And, as with previous work, those changes have been discovered both inside -- and outside -- the tumor, a signature of the lab's recent research. "This is no flash in the pan -- this research really seems to be reflecting something about the very biology of the disease, about which is the more aggressive phenotype, and that's information oncologists do not currently have," said Anant Madabhushi, whose Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD) has become a global leader in the detection, diagnosis and characterization of various cancers and other diseases by meshing medical imaging, machine learning and AI. Currently, only about 20% of all cancer patients will actually benefit from immunotherapy, a treatment that differs from chemotherapy in that it uses drugs to help your immune system fight cancer, while chemotherapy uses drugs to directly kill cancer cells, according to the National Cancer Institute. Madabhushi said the recent work by his lab would help oncologists know which patients would actually benefit from the therapy, and who would not.