The quest to better detect cancer has made a potentially huge strides. A study out of Yokohama, Japan, has potentially harnessed artificial intelligence to help detect colorectal cancer even before benign tumors become malignant. Here's how the researchers used artificial intelligence to spot cancer: The AI program observed a colorectal polyp magnified by 500 times in order to spot its variations. It then cross-referenced those variations against a database of over 30,000 images of pre-cancerous and cancerous cells that were used to train the machine-learning program. With that knowledge base, the AI was able to make a prediction in under a second.