With a new four-year, $1.14 million grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center, will use artificial intelligence (AI) to determine the best personalized treatment for Veterans with rectal cancer.
Satish Viswanath, co-director of the Center for AI Enabling Discovery in Disease Biology (AID2B) at Case Western Reserve and a biomedical engineer and research scientist at the Cleveland VA Medical Center, along with VA co-investigators, plan to use AI to develop an algorithm that analyzes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to better understand how rectal tumors respond to treatment.
The AI tool, called the computational image Rectal Response Classifier (ciRRC), will assess MRI data in more detail than human evaluation alone. The hope is the tool, once fully developed and tested, will allow doctors to offer Veterans timely customized precision oncology treatment.
With the advent of newer combinations of treatments, like chemotherapy and radiation therapy, doctors could use ciRRC to determine whether a patient may be resistant to a specific treatment regimen. They could then offer different options to help patients avoid complications and decide the level of treatment.
The study also includes a unique multi-institutional validation of ciRRC across Midwest VA Medical Centers to expand its potential impact.
