Cambridge University Hospital’s NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) oncologist, Raj Jena, has been appointed the UK’s first clinical Professor of AI in radiotherapy.
The creation of the new Cambridge University Clinical Professorship signals the importance of AI in the fight against cancer and builds on work by the university and Trust to explore and apply the very latest technology to the world’s major challenges.
The technology is already being used in the diagnosis and treatment of some cancers, but Professor Jena – an academic radiation oncologist at CUH, and a researcher in the university’s Department of Oncology – says AI has the potential to transform the way patients’ experience cancer care through more innovative and personalised therapies.
However, developing increasingly powerful tools requires ever larger amounts of information to train AI models on, and so building the research collaborations needed to help gather information on this scale is one of the areas where Professor Jena hopes his new role can help.
Professor Jena’s research into AI in radiation therapy has already seen the OSAIRIS tool (opens in a new tab) – which helps prepare scans, and cuts the time patients have to wait between referral and starting treatment – become the first cloud-based AI technology to be developed and deployed within the NHS. OSAIRIS automatically segments radiotherapy images, identifying and protecting healthy tissue by drawing around it, in just a few minutes, under the control of a clinician.
Now he is designing a new smart radiotherapy machine that goes one step further, and helps identify tumours before suggesting the best possible radiotherapy treatment. The research aims to support cancer services in developing countries, where radiotherapy machines and the staff to run them are in short supply. The new tool will feed scans into a foundation model – trained on an international dataset of medical images – and mark out the tumour target and the best radiotherapy plan to treat it.
He said:
We have known for a long time that tumours shrink and change during the weeks that pass during radiotherapy treatment. We have simply lacked the means to change the treatment each day in line with the changing shape of the tumour. AI can transform this process, so that each day we could take a new scan, build a new picture of the tumour, and recalculate the treatment plan while the patient is lying on the treatment couch.
It means we’re adaptive and protecting everything outside the tumour. It will give us much more information to track how tumours are changing, almost in real time, and allow our radiotherapy to be as precise as possible.
Professor Raj Jena
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