Machine Learning in Modern Cancer Treatment

A s discussed in my previous blog posts, a tool known as the Virtual Operative Assistant has been created that will allow medical students to practice surgery in a similar setting to the operating room, before they complete surgeries on actual patients (Mirchi et al., 2020). In addition to surgical training, making predictions related to a patient's prognosis, such as chance of survival, is one of the most important things for choosing the proper course of treatment. This blog post will cover another important prediction related to neuro-oncology- if a patient's tumor will metastasize to the brain. A metastasis, or the formation of a second tumor away from the original tumor, is one of the most deadly complications that can occur from cancer. A recent study was performed in which an AI system was developed to outline characteristics of cancer cells in tissue grafts from patients that came from both the primary tumor and brain metastases (Oliver et al., 2019). A cell imaging alg

The original use for AI in surgical education was to provide individualized feedback to students, and very little attention was paid to actual assessments of students learning. Since then many improvements have been made to AI including the development of a teaching assistant that can teach material as well as supervise students and provide feedback. However as mentioned in my previous blog post, although surgical simulations used as training for surgeons can be extremely beneficial, the virtual operating assistant along with other surgical training tools that use AI algorithms, do possess certain weaknesses which are explained in a research study performed by Kai Siang Chan and Nabil Zary. The inability to provide sufficient feedback, the possibility of “cheating the system”, the presence of board parameters, and the lack of surgeon expertise and involvement are the few of the obstacles that stand in the way of AI surgical training tools from being implemented in the real world. One m

When looking at modern cancer treatment, one of the most important aspects is educating the doctors of the future. Artificial Intelligence can prove to be a very useful tool when large amounts of data are being used. A recent study on The Virtual Operative Assistant completed by Nykan Mirchi, Vincent Bissonnette, Recai Yilmaz, Nicole Ledwos, Alexander Winkler-Schwartz, and Ronaldo F. Del Maestro, shows the benefits of using AI to conduct training that tests cognitive skills and determines the level of psychomotor expertise that an operator possesses through the use of a surgical simulation. The study aimed to create a model that used AI and could be utilized to train surgeons and authenticate the model using the Virtual Operative Assistant. Artificial Intelligence technologies have often been labeled “black boxes” because of how difficult it is to understand how their algorithm makes a certain decision, however this newly designed model shows potential in multitudes of fields, includin