Mayo Clinic recently announced a collaboration with Google Health, focusing on research and including artificial intelligence (AI) in radiation therapy planning.
This would be a critical step to cancer care and experts from Mayo Clinic will team up with Google Health experts in applying AI to medical imaging.
"Today, more than half of patients diagnosed with cancer receive radiation therapy, and the number is expected to grow in the future," said Nadia Laack, M.D., chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester and one of the principal investigators on the project.
Laack said contouring is particularly challenging for sensitive areas like the head and neck where many delicate structures are located close together and may take six hours or longer for more complex cases.
"During radiation therapy planning, physicians identify organs and tumors in a manual or semiautomated manner that is subject to variability," Laack said, according to the Mayo Clinic News Network.
Chris Beltran, Ph.D., chair of the Division of Medical Physics at Mayo Clinic in Florida and one of the principal investigators on the project, said radiation treatment planning is one of the most labor-intensive and data-rich disciplines in medicine.
"Radiation Oncology is ripe if not overdue for application of AI-augmented methods, particularly deep-learning-based approaches," Beltran said. "We are excited to work with Google Health so we can get closer to developing reliable AI tools to help make sure we get to the best plan possible for each patient."
Cían Hughes, M.B., Ch.B., informatics lead at Google Health, said the potential in using AI to augment parts is huge.
"Radiation oncologists today painstakingly draw lines around sensitive organs like eyes, salivary glands and the spinal cord to make sure radiation beams avoid these areas. And while this works well, it takes a really long time to get it exactly right," Hughes said.
This is the first research collaboration between Mayo Clinic and Google.
