Doctors and scientists from Mass General Brigham and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have created a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that may help predict how throat cancer spreads in a patient’s body.
This kind of cancer, called oropharyngeal cancer, begins in the throat and is a type of head and neck cancer. The new AI tool could help doctors decide which patients need strong treatments like radiation and chemotherapy and which patients may need fewer treatments.
This exciting research was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Dr. Benjamin Kann, a cancer doctor and researcher involved in the study, explained that their tool could help decide which patients should receive more intense treatment, such as extra chemotherapy or new drugs like immunotherapy.
On the other hand, it could also show which patients might do well with lighter treatment, such as surgery alone.
Throat cancer treatments can be very hard on the body. Some patients receive surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, which may lead to side effects that can last a long time.
Because of this, doctors try to give each patient just the right amount of treatment—not too much and not too little. But one big challenge is figuring out how far the cancer has already spread in the body.
One important clue for doctors is something called extranodal extension, or ENE. This happens when cancer cells move outside the lymph nodes and into nearby tissue. If ENE is found, it usually means the cancer is more serious and needs stronger treatment.
But right now, the only way to know for sure if someone has ENE is through surgery. Doctors remove the lymph nodes and check them under a microscope, which is invasive and takes time.
To solve this problem, Dr. Kann and his team created an AI tool that uses CT scans—special medical images of the body—to predict if cancer has spread beyond the lymph nodes. The AI tool doesn’t require surgery. Instead, it looks at the CT scans and uses advanced computer methods to guess how many lymph nodes may have ENE.
The researchers tested this AI tool on the medical images of 1,733 patients who had oropharyngeal cancer. The results were very promising. The AI tool was able to predict whether cancer would spread or return and how long the patients would survive.
When they added the AI’s predictions to regular risk assessments that doctors already use, the predictions became more accurate. This means the AI tool helped doctors better understand which patients had higher or lower chances of surviving and which ones needed stronger treatments.
Dr. Kann explained that this tool is powerful because it can predict the number of lymph nodes affected by ENE before treatment begins. That was not possible before. This new method could improve how doctors stage cancer and plan treatments, leading to better outcomes for patients.
In summary, this study shows how artificial intelligence could become a valuable helper in the fight against throat cancer.
By using computer technology to look closely at medical images, doctors may be able to make smarter decisions, giving patients the right treatment at the right time. It could mean more aggressive care for those who need it, and less treatment—and fewer side effects—for those who don’t.
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