This AI can tell if you have prostate cancer by looking at your pee

This AI can tell if you have prostate cancer by looking at your pee

Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) recently developed a machine for detecting prostate cancer, which can reach nearly 100% accuracy in just 20 minutes and a few ounces of urine. When detecting diseases, the accuracy of human oncologists is only 30%. this is a big problem. Background: Literally, detecting prostate cancer is a pain. Under the current paradigm, the disease is confirmed through a combination of laboratory work and invasive diagnosis. This involves a painful biopsy process in which the surgeon takes a tissue sample from the prostate itself. Unfortunately, many patients who endure this procedure don't actually need it. These otherwise healthy people risk hospital infections, surgical deaths and lingering side effects including discomfort, pain and internal bleeding.

How it works: The KIST team decided to focus on urine because it contains trace amounts of what researchers call "cancer factors". Normally, humans cannot use urine to diagnose prostate cancer because the concentration of these cancer factors is simply not enough to withstand standard testing methods. [Read: Data shows how Netflix shapes mainstream culture] To overcome this obstacle, the team used a special semiconductor-based sensor that is sensitive enough to detect enough data for the team's algorithm to analyze and correlate. According to the press release of the National Science and Technology Commission of Korea:

They trained AI by using the correlation between the four cancer factors, which were obtained from the developed sensor. The trained AI algorithm was then used to identify those with prostate cancer by analyzing complex patterns of the detected signals. The diagnosis of prostate cancer by utilizing the AI analysis successfully detected 76 urinary samples with almost 100 percent accuracy.

Take it quickly: Wow! This is great. Assuming that everything goes well after extending the research to the general population, this could save many lives. On average, 1 in 41 men die of prostate cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men worldwide. Most importantly, the team believes that this work can be adapted to other types of cancer. You can read the team's research paper here.