Up to half of the UK population will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives. Of those, half will be treated with radiotherapy, often in combination with other treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, and increasingly immunotherapy. Radiotherapy involves focusing high-intensity radiation beams to damage the DNA of hard cancerous tumours while avoiding surrounding healthy organs. This is a critical tool in the fight against cancer, with around 40% of cured patients undergoing precision radiotherapy.
Radiotherapy is most effective when treatment takes place as soon as possible. However, segmenting the tumour targets and healthy tissue on image scans is a key step that is currently performed manually by doctors, taking several hours per patient.
Cambridge University Hospitals and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trusts (opens in new tab) received an NHSx AI Award to leverage Microsoft Project InnerEye’s open-source AI toolkit to differentiate tumour and healthy tissue on cancer scans (called ‘segmenting’), prior to radiotherapy treatment. The aim of this AI Award project is to evaluate how this could save clinicians’ time, reduce the time between the scan and commencing treatment, and scale this to four NHS Trusts.