AI diagnoses lung cancers in 20 seconds

Russian researchers from the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) and radiologists from St. Petersburg Clinical Research for Specialized Types of Medical Care developed AI software that can distinguish and subsequently mark lung cancers on a CT scan within 20 seconds. The AI software, dubbed Doctor AI-zimov, can detect lung nodules as small as 2 millimeters on CT scans, according to a prepared statement issued by SPbPU. "Initially, we set up an algorithm to search for nodules starting from 6 millimeters, because radiologists themselves start the treatment of tumors of this size. But the system is so smart that it was able to find nodules of even smaller size," said lead researcher Lev Utkin, PhD, of the SPbPU Research Laboratory of Neural Network Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in St. Petersburg, Russia. Utkin and colleagues trained the software on 1,000 CT scans sourced from the Lung Image Database Consortium.