AI outperforms humans in creating cancer treatments, but do doctors trust it?

The impact of deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) for radiation cancer therapy in a real-world clinical setting has been tested by Princess Margaret researchers in a unique study involving physicians and their patients. A team of researchers directly compared physician evaluations of radiation treatments generated by an AI machine learning (ML) algorithm to conventional radiation treatments generated by humans. They found that in the majority of the 100 patients studied, treatments generated using ML were deemed to be clinically acceptable for patient treatments by physicians. Overall, 89% of ML-generated treatments were considered clinically acceptable for treatments, and 72% were selected over human-generated treatments in head-to-head comparisons to conventional human-generated treatments. Moreover, the ML radiation treatment process was faster than the conventional human-driven process by 60%, reducing the overall time from 118 hours to 47 hours.