When brain tumors recur, survival rates go down, and patients with the most lethal tumor type often die within a year. That’s because cancerous tissue is left behind after the initial surgery, and it continues to grow, sometimes even faster than the original tumor.
Now a new study, led by UC San Francisco and University of Michigan, has demonstrated that using an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered diagnostic tool helps neurosurgeons identify invisible cancer that has spread nearby. The technique has the potential to delay the recurrence of high-grade tumors and it could prevent it in lower-grade tumors.
Shawn Hervey-Jumper, MD
Similar AI techniques will be tested in surgeries for breast, lung, prostate, and head and neck cancers, according to the study, which appears in Nature on Nov. 13.
“This technique will improve our ability to identify tumors and hopefully improve survival due to the added tumor being removed,” said senior author Shawn Hervey-Jumper, MD, of the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery and the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “This model provides physicians with real-time, accurate and clinically actionable diagnostic information within seconds of tissue biopsy.”
The tool, which is open source and patented by UCSF, is known as FastGlioma, and has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
In the study, neurosurgeons examined tumors samples from 220 patients with high-grade and low-grade diffuse glioma, the most common type of adult brain tumor. They found that 3.8% of patients for whom FastGlioma had been applied had remaining high-risk tissue, compared with 24% of patients for whom the tool had not been applied.
“FastGlioma has the potential to change the field of neurosurgery by immediately improving comprehensive management of patients with glioma,” said senior author Todd Hollon, MD, of the Department of Neurosurgery at University of Michigan. “The technology works faster and more accurately than current standards of care methods for tumor detection and could be generalized to other pediatric and adult brain tumor diagnoses.”