AI can predict pancreatic cancer risk 3 years before diagnosis: study

A recent study published in the journal Nature Medicine suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) could help identify individuals most at risk of developing pancreatic cancer, a notoriously difficult cancer to diagnose early.

The study found that AI algorithms could identify patients at risk of developing pancreatic cancer around three years before diagnosis by analyzing patients’ medical records.

Pancreatic cancer is a fast-growing and hard-to-detect cancer, and identifying any cancer early on is important for recovery, but it is especially urgent for pancreatic cancer, which is one of the most difficult cancers to detect in its early stages when it is most curable.

The AI algorithms were trained on clinical data from Denmark spanning 6.2 million patients over 41 years and tested on a US dataset of three million patients from the Veterans Health Administration spanning 21 years.

The AI models were able to identify warning signs for pancreatic cancer within specific time frames, which were more accurate in predicting who would develop pancreatic cancer compared to population-wide estimates based on the incidence levels of the disease.

This method could lead to earlier diagnoses and improved survival rates for pancreatic cancer patients.