Using AI to aid breast cancer treatment

Researchers from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have developed an artificial intelligence model that predicts both the risk of breast cancer recurrence and the likelihood that a patient will benefit from chemotherapy.

The model analyses routine pathology slides taken at diagnosis, offering a fast, widely accessible alternative to costly genomic tests.

The study was recently published in The Lancet Oncology and presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology conference. It is the first AI model of its kind to be validated in a large, randomised clinical trial.

Today, genomic tests such as Oncotype DX are commonly used to guide chemotherapy decisions, but these tests are expensive, can take weeks to return results, and are unavailable to many patients globally.

The Technion-led AI model aims to address these limitations by using information already available in standard pathology samples.