AI and breast cancer: How a Canadian lab plans to use new tech to treat patients

A lab out of Waterloo, Ont., is taking breast cancer research to new heights by working to help patients receive proper treatment with their new technology.

As artificial intelligence continues to get more impressive, a lab out of Waterloo, Ont., is taking breast cancer research to new heights by working to help patients get proper treatment with their new technology.

When patients get breast cancer, they typically undergo a type of imaging, like a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, to look for cancerous tumors. The Waterloo lab has created “a synthetic correlate diffusion” MRI that is tailored to capture details and properties of cancer in a way that previous MRI systems couldn’t.

“It could be a very helpful tool to help oncologists and medical doctors to be able to identify and personalize the type of treatment that a cancer patient gets,” Alexander Wong, professor and Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging at the University of Waterloo, told Global News.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death from cancer in Canadian women, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.

It is estimated that one in eight Canadian women will develop breast cancer during their lifetime and one in 34 will die from it.

Last year, it was also estimated that 28,600 Canadian women would be diagnosed with breast cancer, the society said.

Using synthetic correlate diffusion imagining data, the new AI-driven technology predicts whether a patient is likely to benefit from neoadjuvant chemotherapy – or chemotherapy that occurs before surgery, according to Wong.

Though the hardware of the actual MRI machine hasn’t changed in this model, what has altered is the way the technology sends “pulses” through the patient’s body and how it collects data, Wong noted.