Using a new program that analyzes patients’ tomographies, physicians were able to predict their death by 70% accuracy.
The study’s principal author, Doctor Luke Oakden-Rayner, from the School of Public Health at the University of Adelaide, Australia, along with his colleagues, believe their discovery could mean advancement in precision medicine. This area is defined by National Institutes of Health as “An Emerging Approach to Disease Management and Prevention, which takes into account the individual variability of genes, environment and lifestyle for each person”.
As the study authors note, precision medicine is based on the discovery of biological markers that are accurate indicators of disease risk, response to treatment, or disease prognosis. Specialists believe that radiology plays an important role in this area.
“We believe that images from routine radiology have been ignored over time in the context of precision medicine, and we are giving reasons to convince physicians about the power of new medical techniques that can be applied to imaging from radiologists as a basis of the road to the discovery of new biological markers”, the researchers explain.
“Recent advances in medical image analysis have shown that computer-detectable image-capabilities can approximate the descriptive power of biopsy, microscopy, and even DNA analysis for a range of pathologies”, they continue.
