CANBERRA, May 18 (NNN-AAP) – A team of researchers from the Australian National University (ANU), has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, to more quickly and accurately classify brain tumours.
In a study published yesterday, the team demonstrated that, their deep learning model – DEPLOY – can accurately classify brain tumours into 10 major subtypes.
The AI tool analyses microscopic pictures of a patient’s brain tissue to make its classification.
Danh-Tai Hoang, the co-lead of the project, from the Biological Data Science Institute at ANU, said that, the current gold standard for diagnosing and categorising brain tumours – a process called DNA methylation-based profiling – can take several weeks and is not widely available.
By comparison, the AI tool can deliver results within hours.
“Remarkably, DEPLOY achieved an unprecedented accuracy of 95 percent,” Hoang said, in a media release.
“Furthermore, when given a subset of 309 particularly difficult to classify samples, DEPLOY was able to provide a diagnosis that was more clinically relevant than what was initially provided by pathologists.”
DEPLOY was trained and validated on a dataset of approximately 4,000 patients from the United States and Europe.
Hoang said, it could be used in the future, to add to a pathologist’s initial diagnosis or even prompt a re-evaluation when it finds disparities.
The researchers believe it could eventually be used to help classify other types of cancer.– NNN-AAP