Researchers have built an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can spot lung cancer better than any other existing method – a breakthrough that could speed up diagnosis.

The AI tool, designed by experts at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Imperial College London, can identify whether abnormal growths found on CT scans are cancerous.

Findings published in the Lancet’s eBioMedicine journal suggest that the AI model could also help doctors make quicker decisions about patients with abnormal growths that are currently deemed medium-risk.

The team used CT scans of about 500 patients with large lung nodules to develop an AI algorithm using radiomics. The technique can extract vital information from medical images not easily spotted by the human eye.

The AI model was then tested to determine if it could accurately identify cancerous nodules.

‘According to these initial results, our model appears to identify cancerous large lung nodules accurately,’ Dr Benjamin Hunter, a clinical oncology registrar at the Royal Marsden and a clinical research fellow at Imperial, told The Guardian.

‘Next, we plan to test the technology on patients with large lung nodules in clinic to see if it can accurately predict their risk of lung cancer.’

Named the Libra study, researchers say it’s still in the early stages and more testing will be required before the model can be introduced in healthcare systems.

‘In the future, we hope it will improve early detection and potentially make cancer treatment more successful by highlighting high-risk patients and fast-tracking them to earlier intervention,’ said Dr Hunter.

Lung cancer is the leading worldwide cause of cancer death and accounts for just over a fifth (21%) of cancer deaths in the UK.

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