Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is piloting artificial intelligence (AI) to improve prostate cancer diagnosis practices
The pilot of Prostate Intelligence (Pi) is a partnership between the Leeds NHS trust and Cambridge-based healthcare technology firm Lucida Medical, and will analyse if AI can effectively detect prostate cancer lesions from MRI scans.
The pilot will compare the results delivered by the AI tool against the outcomes of 100 patients who have recently completed the prostate cancer pathway. AI will be tasked with highlighting areas of concern from MRI scans and assessing the risk scores and prostate size, the trust said in a statement. “Our goal is to determine if this AI tool can accurately identify prostate cancer without underestimating or overestimating the likelihood based on MRI scans,” said Dr Oliver Hulson, Consultant Radiologist at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
The Trust hopes that AI will speed up its diagnosis processes and lead to better prioritisation for those with cancer. Productivity improvements could include an increase in the ability of radiologists to see additional patients and faster booking of the biopsy.
The Pi tool has an algorithm that can analyse MRI images having been trained to identify signs of cancer in an MRI scan or biopsy data. Data from patients in the Netherlands and the UK was used to train the algorithm. Part of the pilot will look at how the Pi tool could run automatically as soon as a patient’s MRI scan is completed, and the AI analysis will then be available to the clinical team for review.
“This could enable us to streamline our prostate cancer pathway and reduce the waiting time for a biopsy from the current two to three weeks to less than one week. Ultimately, faster diagnosis means faster treatment and better outcomes for our patients,” Dr Hulson said. Adding: “The aim would be to provide our patients with a rapid diagnostic approach, or ‘one stop shop’ where they could potentially have their MRI scan in the morning, reviewed by the radiologist with the benefit of the AI tool, and if needed, plan for their biopsy that afternoon, performing all their investigations in a single day, rather than over weeks as is the case currently. This would, of course, reduce their anxiety whilst waiting for tests and would provide their results as quickly as possible”.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men, with one in eight men in the UK diagnosed during their lifetime.
