Artificial intelligence detects cancer earlier than ever
A huge breakthrough appears to be available in Canada to detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages. We talked to a woman who believes artificial intelligence helped save her life!
Dianne Balon, 60, is excited she'll now get the chance to watch her grandchildren grow up. She just can't believe her luck that she is one of the very few to get an early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
"I am really thankful! I think this is the beginning of where healthcare needs to turn to, because what a savings both for me on a personal note, my family gets to keep me for a long time, and as well as the healthcare system. I'm happy to be at that forefront and working with Molecular You, the organization to start making these changes, so that it's available for everybody," states Dianne.
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She has been under the watchful care of Rob Fraser, the Co-Founder of Molecular You the past few years, while undergoing AI-powered blood testing.
"We worked closely with her on her chronic condition, so she had a few cardiovascular and metabolic conditions that we tried to optimize with diet and exercise, which she followed religiously and made great improvements. In 2018, she really was mostly a picture of health and by 2022, when we did her analysis, it was very clear to us by her biomarker profile and what our AI tools were telling us is that she had absolutely high risk for pancreatic cancer," explains Fraser.
"What happened in short is that we did an ultrasound and found that I had a lesion on my pancreas and on the tail of my pancreas," says Dianne. "The biopsy turned out to be 10,000-fold out of range and so right away, they determined that this was stage one pancreatic cancer. She was able to get prepped for surgery and they have the surgery done very rapidly. I think one comment Dianne shared with us was that the surgeon couldn't believe she was actually there because it was such an early stage," says Fraser.
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Dianne was able to undergo surgery but got to skip radiation and chemotherapy, since AI technology helped discover her cancer so early. Pancreatic cancer is tricky because patients seldom suffer symptoms until it has advanced to late stage, making it challenging to treat. That leads to a devastatingly low cure rate. Molecular You is hoping to change that.
"We've generated a lot of algorithms using AI tools and looked at all the world's literature to really understand exactly what those biomarkers mean. What do they mean when they're out of range? When they're normal range? The goal of the organization has always been to detect disease early and even before it's symptomatic. Because we look at the mechanisms of disease, we can actually see disease before it becomes symptomatic, like in the case of Dianne," says Fraser.
Molecular You is also delving into studying the brain, and researchers believe AI is also detecting Alzheimer's disease early. This company is based in Canada, but they're starting to team-up with clinics here in the U.S. and are hopeful this is the future of medicine.
For more information visit https://www.molecularyou.com