HP Innovation Journal Issue 14: Spring 2020 | Page 61

From more powerful diagnostic imaging to genetic
testing to immunotherapy innovations, new and
emerging technologies will play a key role in accelerating
the fight against cancer and potentially help reduce the
mortality rate even further. of years ago, providers started taking digital images of
diseased tissue, and researchers built repositories of imaged
tumors from different patients. A new world came into view,
aided by algorithms that let computers make predictions
about which cells appear cancerous and which don’t.
“There’s a sense of tremendous advances in treating
cancers that would otherwise have killed the patient
very quickly,” says Joel Saltz, a pathologist and Stony
Brook Medicine’s vice president for clinical informatics.
“People are having months or years of symptom-free life.” “Computing power has grown by a factor of a million in
the last 25 years, which really impacts how long it takes to
do computations,” Saltz says. “The AI performs complex
statistical analysis that can circle cancer in imaging after
you teach it the general rules of what tumor cells look like.”
SMARTER DETECTION THROUGH AI
Not long ago, detecting cancer required a biopsy, which
a pathologist would examine through a microscope to
determine if cells had turned malignant. Then, a couple
Illustrations by Yukai Du
Now, AI systems wielding a powerful form of machine learning
called deep learning are improving the predictive assistance
they can offer, allowing researchers like Saltz to connect image
analysis to patient-specific biochemical profiles.
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