Ideastream Public Media | By Stephen Langel

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals are using artificial intelligence to better treat rectal cancer.

Doing so can help patients avoid unnecessary and invasive surgeries. It’s the first project under a new research center using AI to improve healthcare.

The institutions will apply a $2.78 million grant from the National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute to use AI in analyzing medical images from more than 900 rectal cancer patients, a news release said. The research will also include data collected in a previous clinical trial of rectal cancer patients.

Case Western Reserve University’s Satish Viswanath said the goal is to use AI to help ensure greater accuracy of these assessments and greater certainty about whether radiation and chemotherapy have led to cancerous tumor death or significant regression.

“We’re able to take the MRI scans through specialized AI algorithms that go in and extract measurements from those scans, which we have shown are associated with response by the body,” he said. “The current clinical criteria are not as accurate as they need to be in capturing this kind of information.”

Use of AI could also “fundamentally help these patients avoid a surgery safely without impacting their survival, which would mean that they don’t have to suffer the complications of surgery,” Viswanath said. “Quality of life is a lot better. Lower chance of infection, no chance of the side effects.”

This is particularly important given how invasive the surgery is, he said.

“Rectal surgery is probably one of the more morbid, one of the more invasive surgeries that would involve completely excising the rectum. High chance of infection, high chance of incontinence as a result,” he said. “High chances of having dysfunction — sexual dysfunction, urinary dysfunction.”

This rectal cancer research project is the first by the new Center for AI Enabling Discovery in Disease Biology, which was launched in May, Viswanath said. The center is run out of Case Western Reserve University and works in partnership with researchers at Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals.

“The initiative is essentially to try and, harness the power of AI across multiple disciplines,” Viswanath said, adding that the center focuses on both using AI to engineer precision medicine and predictive modeling, as well as using AI for clinical care.

Ohio has approximately 6,000 cases of colorectal cancer each year, which is higher than the national average, according to Viswanath. It’s also the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men and the fourth-leading cause in women in the U.S., making it the second most common cause of cancer deaths for men and women combined, according to the American Cancer Society.