I attended a talk today, concerning the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cancer research.  Dr. Paul Brooks discussed his research using AI to study a particular treatment of sarcoma, a cancer in the supportive tissues of the body (i.e. blood vessels, bones, muscles, etc).

He described the need to use computer algorithms to improve brachytherapy, a method that can be applied post removal of a tumor.  What brachytherapy does is insert sealed sources of radiotherapy around the the area from where the tumor was removed to treat the leftover diseased tissue.  In the abstract of his publiction Dr. Brooks describes the current practice of determining the area for brachytherapy treatment to be a “tedious manual process”. 

What his research entailed was using AI to automatically classify the contours of how the radiotherapy sources were to be placed.  The AI would be able to distinguish between various structures of sarcoma tumour beds and suggest the best placement for the radiotherapy treatment.

I’m not sure about any other bioinformaticians out there but its pretty exciting to see computer science and biology merged together for actual clinical application.

Dr. Brooks’s abstract can be found here via PubMed.