“Model could help doctors identify patients with cellular characteristics that indicate more aggressive tumors, and flag them for accelerated follow-up.”
NEWS October 2023
From Stanford:
“Glioblastoma is a swift and aggressive brain cancer, with an average life expectancy of about one year after diagnosis. It’s difficult to treat, in part because the cellular makeup of each tumor varies greatly from person to person.
“Because of the heterogeneity of this disease, scientists haven’t found good ways of tackling it,” said Olivier Gevaert, PhD, associate professor of biomedical informatics and of data science.
Doctors and scientists also struggle with prognosis, as it can be difficult to parse which cancerous cells are driving each patient’s glioblastoma.
But Stanford Medicine scientists and their colleagues recently developed an artificial intelligence model that assesses stained images of glioblastoma tissue to predict the aggressiveness of a patient’s tumor, determine the genetic makeup of the tumor cells and evaluate whether substantial cancerous cells remain after surgery.
“It’s sort of a decision support system for the physicians,” said Yuanning Zheng, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Gevaert’s lab. Their team recently published a study in Nature Communications describing how the model could help doctors identify patients with cellular characteristics that indicate more aggressive tumors, and flag them for accelerated follow-up.”