AI in Gastric Cancer Care: A Bright Future
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical care has evolved so quickly in recent years that many professionals in the field are referring to the nascent technology as a “doctor’s deputy” in clinical care, or even a “co-investigator” in laboratory studies aimed at finding new cures. But what does this mean for the future of gastric cancer research and care?
No doubt, there’s been an explosion of research into the possible uses of AI in gastric cancer research and care—a clear indication that the technology has a bright future in the effort to improve the lives of patients.
The Gastric Cancer Foundation is committed to supporting thoughtful research that explores how AI can meaningfully improve gastric cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care. Most recently, we awarded the American Gastroenterology Association–Gastric Cancer Foundation Ben Feinstein Memorial Research Scholar Award to Dr. Jeong Yun (John) Yang, a T32 fellow of the Gastroenterology Fellowship at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Yang’s project, which will be funded for the next three years, involves using machine learning to analyze genomic and clinical data from patients with H. pylori, a stomach infection known to raise the risk of gastric cancer. Ultimately, he hopes what he learns will help create better screening methods to identify H. pylori patients who face a high risk of developing gastric cancer. “We are missing silent cases and need to get ahead of these infections so we can prevent bad outcomes,” he told the Foundation in April.
At several major oncology meetings this year, we’ve seen firsthand how researchers are exploring AI’s potential to personalize gastric cancer care. At the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting, Vanderbilt University Medical Center professor Tae Hyun Hwang, PhD, presented an ambitious vision of oncologists working hand-in-hand with “agentic” AI—tools that are so smart they can complete complex tasks such as processing a patient’s clinical data and then scouring the medical literature to find similar cases. Hwang got his start two years ago using AI to analyze the microenvironment of gastric cancer, and now he’s expanding his work to include all tumor types. He envisions a system in which AI can take a wide range of diagnostic data and use it in a “virtual tumor board,” which would provide actionable information oncologists can use to select the best treatment paths for each patient.
Several recent research studies have uncovered the potential of AI for improving the detection of gastric cancer and predictions about how it will progress in individual patients. For example, a University of Birmingham team used AI to demonstrate how six specific gut bacteria and metabolites could improve the early detection of gastric cancer. Researchers in Brazil recently used artificial intelligence to scour 10 years of data from 461 gastric cancer patients, from which they identified a new biomarker that uses the density of fat and muscle tissue to determine which patients face the highest risk of progressing unfavorably. And scientists at the Cleveland Clinic used data from electronic health records to build a predictive model that may be able to be used to identify people who should be routinely screened for gastric cancer.
It’s clear researchers have barely scratched the surface of what AI can offer in cancer prevention and care. At the ASCO Breakthrough meeting held in Singapore in June, AI took center stage, with many presentations focused on diverse uses of the technology. They included embedding AI into electronic medical records, so patients who are eligible for clinical trials could be automatically identified, as well as integrating the technology into radiology and pathology assays to improve the accuracy of diagnoses and identification of biomarkers that can be targeted with drugs.
“We’re encouraged by AI’s potential to accelerate drug discovery, improve earlier detection and diagnosis, and help ensure patients receive the most appropriate care – challenges that are especially important for a cancer that receives comparatively less research attention like gastric cancer,” said Gastric Cancer Foundation Executive Director Harriet Patterson, MPH. “Along with our partners, we’ll continue to support thoughtful, evidence-based innovation that leads to meaningful progress for patients.”
