Can deep-learning algorithms identify genetic mutations or aberrant cellular signalling pathways from medical images?

我们的项目将确定在肿瘤中发现的与癌症相关的基因突变是否可以通过医学手段检测到 成像。肿瘤是由一系列基因错误引起的，这些错误决定了肿瘤的大部分行为， 包括它的攻击性和对治疗的反应。在日常医学成像中，一旦患者有 在接受医学扫描后，专家将查看图像并提供诊断(例如肝癌)。 有时，为了更好地确定癌症的亚型，需要进行活检(肿瘤样本)。我们的项目旨在 通过向医生提供使用人工智能和 先进的计算机软件。人们已经知道，这些生物在发现和量化方面优于人类 微妙的图像特征。我们假设这些图像特征可以预测癌症 亚型及其最佳处理。首先，这个软件必须经过训练才能识别突变。因为人类 肿瘤千差万别，很难区分个体固有的视觉特征 与突变引起的变异不同。为了克服这一点，我们将使用转基因小鼠 模型-这些模型将具有导致癌症的特定突变，但它们之间的可变性有限 动物。这将使我们能够训练一种软件来识别具有特定突变的肿瘤。如果成功， 我们的项目最终将导致软件工具具有类似于活组织检查的能力，并且更好和更少 癌症的侵入性治疗。

Our project will determine if cancer-related genetic mutations found in tumours can be detected using medical imaging. Tumours arise from a series of genetic errors, and these determine much of the behaviour of a tumour, including its aggressiveness and its response to a treatment. In day-to-day medical imaging, once a patient has undergone a medical scan, a specialist will look at the images and provide a diagnosis (e.g., liver cancer). Sometimes, a biopsy (tumour sample) is acquired to better determine the subtype of cancer. Our project aims at assisting physicians by providing them with additional information extracted using artificial intelligence and advanced computer software. These are already known to be superior to humans in finding and quantifying subtle image characteristics. We hypothesize that these image characteristics could be predictive of the cancer subtype and its optimal treatment. First, this software has to be trained to recognize mutations. Because human tumours vary a lot, it is difficult to differentiate visual characteristics caused by an individual inherent variability from those caused by the mutation. To overcome this, we will use genetically engineered mouse models - these will have specific mutations that will result in cancer but with limited variability between animals. This will allow us to train a software to recognize tumours that have specific mutations. If successful, our project will ultimately lead to software tools with capabilities similar to biopsies, and better and less invasive management of cancer.