A machine learning algorithm accurately determined how well skin cancer patients would respond to tumor-suppressing drugs in four out of five cases, according to research conducted by a team from NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Perlmutter Cancer Center.
“While immune checkpoint inhibitors have profoundly changed the treatment landscape in melanoma, many tumors do not respond to treatment, and many patients experience treatment-related toxicity,” said corresponding study author Iman Osman.
“Our findings reveal that artificial intelligence is a quick and easy method of predicting how well a melanoma patient will respond to immunotherapy,” said study first author Paul Johannet.
“Several recent attempts to predict immunotherapy responses do so with robust accuracy but use technologies, such as RNA sequencing, that are not readily generalizable to the clinical setting,” said corresponding study author Aristotelis Tsirigos, PhD, professor in the Institute for Computational Medicine.
“There is potential for using computer algorithms to analyze histology images and predict treatment response, but more work needs to be done using larger training and testing datasets, along with additional validation parameters, in order to determine whether an algorithm can be developed that achieves clinical-grade performance and is broadly generalizable,” said Tsirigos.