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Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) recently developed a machine to detect prostate cancer that only needs 20 minutes of your time and a few ounces of your pee to achieve a accuracy of nearly 100%. Human oncologists are only about 30% accurate when it comes to detecting the disease. This is a big deal.
Context: Finding prostate cancer is literally a pain in the ass. Under the current paradigm, the disease is confirmed by a combination of laboratory work and invasive diagnostics. This involves a painful biopsy procedure where surgeons take a sample of tissue from the prostate itself.
Unfortunately, a large number of patients who undergo this procedure do not actually need it. These otherwise healthy people are at risk of infection in hospital, surgical death, and lingering side effects, including discomfort, pain, and internal bleeding.
How it works: The KIST team decided to focus on urine because it contains traces of what researchers call “cancer factors”. Generally, humans cannot diagnose prostate cancer using urine because the concentration of these cancerous factors is simply not high enough to withstand standard testing methods.
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To overcome this hurdle, the team used a special semiconductor-based sensor sensitive enough to detect enough data for the team’s algorithms to analyze and correlate.
According to a press release from the Korea National Science and Technology Council:
They trained the AI using the correlation between the four cancer factors, which were obtained from the developed sensor. The trained AI algorithm was then used to identify people with prostate cancer by analyzing complex patterns of the detected signals. Diagnosis of prostate cancer using AI analysis successfully detected 76 urine samples with almost 100% accuracy.
Quick setting: Wow! It’s awesome. Assuming everything in the research takes place on a general population scale, it could save a lot of lives. On average, about 1 in 41 men will die of prostate cancer, it is the second leading cause of cancer death in men worldwide.
Better yet, the team believes this work can be adapted for other types of cancer.
You can read the team’s research paper here.
Published January 21, 2021 – 18:48 UTC
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