Is AI the Future of Prostate Cancer Management?

This is a special edition of our newsletter Ultrasound Today. In support of Movember and men’s health, we’ve created a complimentary white paper for clinicians and patients entitled Is AI the Future of Prostate Cancer Management? We invite you to download the full paper on our website.?

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Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men after skin cancer, and just like with many diseases, doctors and researchers keep working together to improve the diagnosis process and find better treatments to enhance men’s health.?

Some prostate cancers can grow and spread fast. However, most of them grow slowly. In fact, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS), autopsy studies have shown that many older men and even some younger ones, who have died from other causes also had prostate cancer but were never actually affected by it.?

According to the ACS, about 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime. The prostate cancer forecast for 2022 is menacing:?

• About 268,490 new cases of prostate cancer?
• About 34,500 deaths from prostate cancer?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been making great strides in the healthcare field in the last decade and oncology is no exception. When it comes to prostate cancer, researchers have been exploring the application of AI in its detection and treatment.?

Machine learning, a subfield of AI, is being applied to diagnostic imaging to perform low-level analysis tasks like prostate segmentation and fusion of different imaging modalities that include MRI, CT and ultrasound. Besides that, this AI algorithm is also used to execute high-level inference tasks that go from prediction tasks, such as prostate cancer detection, to characterization of the disease.?

In an article published in Future Generation Computer Systems in 2022, the authors reported that several pre-trained deep learning systems could achieve a maximum accuracy of 97% on ultrasound images and 80% on MRI images.?

Researchers suggest that the introduction of AI in medical imaging for prostate cancer management is an approach that can be adopted in hospitals and clinics for more efficient prostatic cancer detection and explanation. This wouldn't only benefit patients but could also relieve pressure on the workflow in the detection of this disease caused by the rising case incidence and the shortage of personnel available to review imaging studies.?

Other advantages of the use of artificial intelligence in prostate cancer can be seen already in the areas of surgical interventions, digital pathology, and genomics. However, since these advances are relatively new, there is still a lack of information on how these systems work and how they can be beneficial in medicine.?

Although, it is expected that one of the biggest benefits provided by artificial intelligence is that it will allow doctors and specialists to manage large datasets more accurately?and in less time, thereby reducing the level of subjectivity when treating prostate cancer patients and increasing the efficiency in diagnosing and offering treatments.?

Overall, when viewing the use of AI in prostate cancer from a radiology lens, it is evident that the technology will have a significant impact on detection and diagnosis of the disease. However, there are still several areas, such as tumor aggressiveness classification, drug discovery, therapy administration, and patient follow-up, that remain unexplored and represent exciting opportunities for the application of AI in prostate cancer management.?

Learn more about this topic by downloading the complete version of our complimentary white paper Is AI the Future of Prostate Cancer Management??here.