AI makes nearly 100% accurate cancer diagnosis from urine

An early, accurate cancer diagnosis can dramatically improve a patient's outcome, but the tests used to diagnose some cancers are invasive at best and downright awful at worst. Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in men, with more than 1.2 million new cases every year. Doctors usually screen for it by looking at the levels of a protein called prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in a patient's blood. However, the PSA test isn't very accurate (70% of the people it flags as having prostate cancer don't), so people with high levels of PSA in their blood have to undergo a biopsy to confirm the diagnosis -- an invasive procedure that can lead to rectal bleeding, difficulty urinating, and other unpleasant side effects. Now, researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have developed an AI that can make a nearly 100% accurate prostate cancer diagnosis from a urine sample -- and it may work for other types of cancers, too.