Doctors believe Artificial Intelligence is now saving lives, after a major advancement in breast cancer screenings. A.I. is detecting early signs of the disease, in some cases years before doctors would find the cancer on a traditional scan. Department of Veterans Affairs researchers at five medical centers are working together to develop an artificial intelligence algorithm that can predict aggressive prostate cancer. The new research study began July 1, expanding to 14 sites. It will analyze data from more than 5,000 veterans who were diagnosed with high-risk prostate cancer and have undergone initial treatment.

Dogs that can smell prostate cancer could inspire'robotic noses' to sniff out the disease, in a technique dubbed'machine olfaction', a new study reveals. In a pilot study, British and US researchers trained dogs to detect aggressive prostate cancer from people's urine samples. Dogs have an extremely sensitive sense of smell and can pick up on'volatile organic compounds' (VOCs) released during the early stages of many cancers. The scientists then used the data to create an artificial neural network that could detect the cancer-specific chemicals that the dogs could smell. The hope is that the dogs' performance can eventually be replicated and used in technology such as an app on a smartphone.

University of Alberta scientists developed a deep learning-based prostate cancer diagnostic platform that only uses a single drop of blood which will allow men to bypass the current painful biopsy methods. Using a GTX 1060 GPU, CUDA and the MathWorks Neural Network Toolbox, the scientists' trained their model on information from millions of cancer cell nanoparticles in the blood to recognize the unique fingerprint of aggressive prostate cancer. To test their method, they evaluated a group of 377 men who were referred to their urologist with suspected prostate cancer and found that their system called Extracellular Vesicle Fingerprint Predictive Score (EV-FPS) correctly identified men with aggressive prostate cancer 40 percent more accurately than the most common test in wide use today. "Higher sensitivity means that our test will miss fewer aggressive cancers," said John Lewis, the Alberta Cancer Foundation's Frank and Carla Sojonky Chair of Prostate Cancer Research at the University of Alberta. "For this kind of test you want the sensitivity to be as high as possible because you don't want to miss a single cancer that should be treated."