AI-based Screening for Breast Cancer Treatment

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AI-based Screening for Breast Cancer Treatment Breast cancer is the commonest cancer affecting women. For Canada in 2014, an estimated number of 24,400 new diagnoses of breast cancer with a reported range cost of 309-454 million CAD for diagnosis and treatment. Recently, personalized medicine has increased this cost further. The goal of the proposed research is to find AI-based solutions to replace expensive molecular tests and to reduce the significant turn around time (TAT) inherent to the complexity of these molecular assays. For this project, Alberta Health Services (AHS) and DynaLIFE Medical Labs Edmonton are partnering with Dr. Nilanjan Ray and his team at Computing Science, University of Alberta. Canadian overall healthcare quality ranking is still among the best in the world and beats the U.S. healthcare system, even though it represents 10.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) compared to 17.8% of the U.S. GDP. It is budgetarily challenging to maintain this rank. Medicine is permanently evolving, and a new paradigm includes the capacity to exploit a large amount of data through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to better screen, diagnose, predict, treat and follow-up diseases. These tools can reduce costs significantly. It might be therefore critical for Canada to not only be ready to adopt these tools but to develop them. Canada has centres of excellence in the field of ML. This project is an example where these two aforementioned goals are met: 1) optimization (reduction of cost, improved TAT) of important cancer biomarkers, and 2) strengthening local ML expertise (Research, student recruitment, potential startup, and improving local economy).