Researchers from Stanford Medicine have developed “an artificial intelligence-powered computational program that can predict the activity of thousands of genes within tumor cells based only on standard microscopy images of the biopsy.”
The program was reported in an article in Nature Communications. The tool “was created using data from more than 7,000 diverse tumor samples. The team showed that it could use routinely collected biopsy images to predict genetic variations in breast cancers and to predict patient outcomes.”
The AI program, named SEQUOIA (slide-based expression quantification using linearized attention), was able to predict the expression patterns of more than 15,000 different genes from the stained images. For some cancer types, the AI-predicted gene activity had a more than 80% correlation with the real gene activity data. In general, the more samples of any given cancer type that were included in the initial data, the better the model performed on that cancer type.”
