AI matches humans at diagnosing brain cancer from tumour biopsy images

The AI analyses high-resolution images of tumours produced using a method called stimulated Raman histology (SRH). Todd Hollon at the University of Michigan and his colleagues generated more than 2 million SRH images of brain tumours from 415 people with known diagnoses. Each image showed a small region of an excised tumour and was labelled with which type of brain tumour it was out of the 10 most common types. The team fed them all to the AI so it could learn from the images to identify tissue features linked to these specific types of cancer. The images had either come from biopsies that remove a small sample of a suspected tumour for analysis or from surgeries to remove tumours.