New Delhi:Researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that interprets medical images with unprecedented clarity and may help clinicians diagnose and better treat cancers that might otherwise go undetected.
The tool, called iStar (Inferring Super-Resolution Tissue Architecture), and developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, US, provides both highly detailed views of individual cells and a broader look at the full spectrum of how people's genes operate.
The imaging technique, described in the journal Nature Biotechnology, would allow doctors to see cancer cells that might otherwise have been virtually invisible, the researchers said. This tool can be used to determine whether safe margins were achieved through cancer surgeries and automatically provide annotation for microscopic images, paving the way for molecular disease diagnosis at that level, they said.
The researchers said iStar has the ability to automatically detect critical anti-tumor immune formations called "tertiary lymphoid structures," whose presence correlates with a patient's likely survival and favourable response to immunotherapy, which is often given for cancer and requires high precision in patient selection.
This means that iStar could be a powerful tool for determining which patients would benefit most from immunotherapy, they said. "The power of iStar stems from its advanced techniques, which mirror, in reverse, how a pathologist would study a tissue sample," said Mingyao Li, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.