Applying AI to cancer research, a UF professor helps transform medical imaging

Medical imaging plays a central role in the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of cancer – whether it involves visualizing the location of a tumor for surgery or tracking disease progression over time. And artificial intelligence is completely transforming the process, helping to improve diagnostic accuracy and lower health care costs.

Researchers at the UF Health Cancer Center are currently developing AI algorithms for a range of medical image analysis tasks, such as multimodal image fusion, cancer detection, organ segmentation and enhanced image resolution.

“Our goal is to create personalized, effective and less expensive health care solutions that reduce the burden of diseases like cancer,” said Wei Shao, Ph.D., an assistant professor of quantitative health in the UF College of Medicine and a faculty member in UF’s AI Initiative, who is leading this effort in AI-enhanced medical imaging.

Creating solutions

Shao’s lab is called the Medical Imaging Research for Translational Healthcare with Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or the MIRTH AI Lab. One of the lab’s main projects involves using AI to improve prostate cancer diagnosis. Prostate cancer is the most diagnosed cancer, excluding skin cancer, and the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States.

Currently, the most accurate diagnostic test for prostate cancer is a two-step process. A radiologist identifies suspicious lesions on an MRI, and then a urologist performs an MRI-ultrasound fusion-guided biopsy. The method has limitations, including the high cost and the limited number of well-trained radiologists to read scans, Shao said.