Harnessing AI to Revolutionize Lung Cancer Care

Artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in advancing lung cancer care, particularly in diagnostics and treatment. Edgardo S. Santos, MD, FACP, FASCO, a hematologist and medical oncologist at the Oncology Institute of Hope and Innovation, highlighted artificial intelligence's potential in analyzing imaging data, such as identifying irregularities in x-rays or computer tomography (CT) scans that may indicate malignancies, as well as detecting patterns of interstitial lung disease caused by medication or radiation.

Additionally, artificial intelligence can predict driver mutations by analyzing biopsy images, potentially eliminating the need for molecular testing. While acknowledging artificial intelligence's vast potential, Santos emphasized the importance of regulation to ensure its safe and ethical use in health care.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

How are artificial intelligence and machine learning being used to advance lung cancer care, from diagnosis to treatment?

Well, that's another hot topic right now: artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can be applied anywhere in any single aspect of our life, from our daily activities, finance, agriculture, banking, and also in health care. So, again, just talking about lung cancer, artificial intelligence will have a many utilities. The recent ones that I have learned about, for example, is in the imaging setting. Artificial intelligence collects several data from thousands of imaging and artificial intelligence can predict, for example, if an irregular x-ray or CT scan a could predict that a patient may have a malignant disease ongoing and could perhaps alert the physician that to either [follow it closely] or perform a biopsy.

Another example for when [artificial intelligence is] collecting thousands of images, there is a problem that we call in lung cancer "interstitial lung disease," which basically is an inflammatory pattern. Today, there are different patterns of interstitial lung disease, and sometimes we have difficulty to seeing it because of radiation oncology or inflammation in the lung field or because of the medication that the patient is getting. And this is very important because it's very tricky [to figure out] how we are going to handle this issue with our patient. So artificial intelligence is collecting these thousands of inflammatory process in the lung that they can predict if this is secondary to the medication or secondary to radiation therapy, and that will help the clinician, again, to manage the patient.

Believe it or not, there is another technology in artificial intelligence collecting thousands and thousands of biopsies seen on a microscope and just by looking at the parent of the adenocarcinoma and how the cells look, the artificial intelligence can predict if the patient has a particular driver mutation. Amazing! So without doing a molecular testing and just by looking the pattern and the structure of the cells, [the artificial intelligence] can predict that.

So you can see how the artificial intelligence by collecting thousands of [pieces of] information can help us in the future. And this is going to be the future. However, as you heard in the news, artificial intelligence must be regulated, because in the wrong hands it can hurt people. So that's another issue that is not for us. But certainly, [artificial intelligence] has a lot of potential that, as humans, we need to be savvy about how to handle it. And [we need to figure out] how to moderate, utilize, and legislate that kind of advancement in technology in general.