For decades now, cancer has been devastating the world, taking many lives. The battle against cancer is an ugly one, as there is no accurate cure. Doctors and researchers are always working to develop the existing drugs and trying to figure out new ones that guarantees healing, as existing drugs don’t always work with everyone, depending on how the cancer spread in the body, which organs it attacks and which stage it was discovered. In the research field, recently, researchers have figured out that artificial intelligence can play a huge part in the battle against cancer.

Artificial intelligence has been found to be of significant help in the research and medical fields, as researchers have found out that machine learning can do tasks which are just too difficult for the human brain, and it also spot things which the human eye can not.

An important branch of AI is deep learning; which can extract data from huge amounts of input and information, it also recognises information that the human eye doesn’t.

This can play a very important part in the early diagnosis of tumors, which can be done through image data, in addition, AI can also play a role when treating tumors. Artificial intelligence is usually done on a multi-layer neural network structures; this has a potential to stimulate the human thinking mode, in which AI sort of functions like a human brain; it can make fast and intuitive judgements in order to solve problems. AI can very much optimize the existing models of researches relating to cancer.

AI could be used in prediction of drug activities and also helps in the drug development. Same drugs react differently with different cancers, not all of them respond the way we expect.

 This is where AI comes in; it can reveal the relationship between genomic variances of cancer cells and the drug activities through screening procedures. One of the models that can do so, can predict the activity of the drugs based on the mutation state of the cell genome of the cancer. Another example is the development of machine learning tools, which were proved to be successful when it came to predictability of drug sensitivity for those who have ovarian, gastric or endometrial cancer. AI also plays a great role in labeling drug resistance in cancer, as AI can understand the patterns of cancer and how it can become resistant to the drugs, all through machine learning and data analysis, which leads to better drug development. Artificial intelligence could potentially improve cancer imaging, screening, diagnosis as well as treatment, it can also help with the progress of research related to cancer.

AI also plays a significant role in chemo-therapy, for now, it is limited to the response of patients to the drugs they take, but as researches keep going, it will eventually play much bigger roles in the treatment. According to studies taking place at The Marine Medical Research Institute of Guangdong Zhanjiang, Guangdong Medical University, China, a recent study has shown that an optimal dose of zen-3694 and enzalutamide, using an artificial intelligence platform, that improved the efficacy as well as the tolerance of the combined treatment, and it was done through AI.

Another example was the creation of a machine learning tool which can show the tolerance of chemotherapy on breast cancer cases. It shows the relationship between the drugs and genes of the patients, it successfully distinguished the effects of two different chemotherapy drugs on the patients, the drugs are taxol and gemcitabine.

It’s clear that AI continues to develop and play a role in breakthroughs in many fields, especially when it comes to treatment and curing patients from dangerous diseases like cancer.