Microsoft is also teaming with the Knight Cancer Institute on AI that would personalize those drug mixes on a patient-by-patient basis. They're primarily focused on acute myeloid leukemia, where you might end up battling multiple leukemias at once -- machine learning could identify just what you're dealing with and treat it accordingly. Another effort would lean heavily on computer vision to understand how a tumor is reacting to treatments. Human doctors can easily identify tumors, Microsoft notes, but they can't always tell how tumors are changing or how they're affecting the health of nearby cells. The Redmond crew is even more ambitious than that.

Google isn't the only tech giant hoping that artificial intelligence can aid the fight against cancer. Microsoft has unveiled Project Hanover, an effort to use AI for both understanding and treating cancers. To begin with, the company is developing a system that would automatically process legions of biomedical papers, creating "genome-scale" databases that could predict which drug cocktails would be the most effective against a given cancer type. An ideal treatment wouldn't go unnoticed by doctors already swamped with work. Microsoft is also teaming with the Knight Cancer Institute on AI that would personalize those drug mixes on a patient-by-patient basis.