The August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (Idibaps) of the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona has developed a new tool artificial intelligence (AI) for facilitate the diagnosis of prostate canceras reported in a press conference this Thursday.
The tool, created within the framework of the European project Incisive and available for free, allows the professional to upload a medical image, such as an MRI, and provides a report in which It indicates whether the patient has a tumor or could develop one, which can help doctors refine the final diagnosis.
Dr. Carles Nicolau, from the Radiology Service (Center for Diagnostic Imaging), explained that the objective of the tool is also help the radiologist detect invisible lesions to the human eye and predict its severity.
According to Idibaps researcher Lourdes Mengual, the development has posed a technical challenge when it comes to homogenizing all the data, but also an ethical and legal one, as “sensitive medical data must be stored in a secure environment.”
A “great milestone”
At the same press conference, the director of the Clinical Institute of Nephrology and Urology, Rosa Ramos, described the project as a “great milestone.” Along these lines, the head of the Urology service at the Clínic and head of the Idibaps research group Genetics and urological tumors, Antonio Alcaraz, has assured that the tool “democratizes medicine”, since it provides the knowledge of specialists to less specialized doctors.
The European ‘Incisive’ project
The initiative is part of the European project Incisive, financed by the European Unionwhose objective is to develop, train and validate a set of multimodal AI-based tools for the detection and diagnosis of breast, lung, colon and prostate, The latter being the one that the Clínic-Idibaps has focused on.
Additionally, Incisive has also created a federated medical data repository in which More than 3.7 million images of more than 9,000 patients have been uploaded, which will continue to be fed by more data in the future.