A research team of computer scientists and pathologists have trained an artificial intelligence tool to help determine which patients with lung cancer have a higher risk of their disease coming back after treatment.
The study is part of Cancer Research UK’s TRACERx study, a £14 million, 9-year programme. The research is in its early stages, but is hoped the approach could predict which patients are more likely to see their lung cancer return, so they can be closely monitored with tailored treatment plans.
The AI tool has been developed by researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, in collaboration with scientists at University College London Cancer Institute and the Francis Crick Institute. It was trained by pathologists to pick out immune cells from cancer cells. This allowed the tool to map out areas in tumours where the number of immune cells were high compared to the number of cancer cells, in patients with lung cancer.
Using the AI tool, the team found that while some parts of the tumour were high with immune cells, described as ‘hot’ regions, other parts of the tumour appeared to be completely devoid of them, which they described as ‘cold’ regions.
When the researchers followed the progress of patients who had a higher number of ‘cold’ regions, they found patients were at a higher risk of relapse.
The researchers suggest that areas of the tumour with fewer immune cells may have developed a ‘cloaking’ mechanism under evolutionary pressure from the immune system allowing them to hide from the body’s natural defences. The AI tool can assess how many regions with this cloaking mechanism exist within a tumour.
Dr Yinyin Yuan, Team Leader in Computational Pathology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: “In our new study, we applied artificial intelligence to genetic data and pathology images, to create a new tool that could in the future help pick out those patients with lung cancer who are at highest risk of their cancer coming back.”
“We’ve gained new insight into how lung cancers can cloak themselves to escape the attention of the immune system – and in doing so can continue to evolve and develop. Cancer’s ability to evolve and to come back after treatment is one of the biggest challenges facing cancer researchers and doctors today.”
“Our research has revealed fresh insights into why some lung cancers are so difficult to treat, and we wouldn’t have been able to do this without the scale and scope of the TRACERx project.”
