People have a lot of ideas about how AI will be used in the future, but in some New Jersey hospitals, AI is already being used to save lives and make things better.
Interventional pulmonologist for AtlantiCare, Dr. Amit Borah, says that AI has been used to help doctors find pulmonary nodules that are or could become cancerous. The technology has been used by AtlantiCare since October 2022.
He said that people have been finding this kind of nodule for decades, but they don’t always follow up on it properly. This means that sometimes cancer in its early stages turns into a much more dangerous cancer in its late stages.
Helping to Identify a Problem
Borah said AtlantiCare has partnered with the Optellum Virtual Nodule Clinic to use an AI program that takes a look at every scan done at AtlantiCare and other medical facilities in the region. If a scan looks bad, the program tells the people taking care of the patient.
“In just a few months, artificial intelligence has already helped us find a few hundred nodules. Borah said, “We’ve already had patients who needed biopsies come to our clinic.”
He said that some of these people had surgery and others had radiation.
It’s a Life-Saving Tool
As with other types of cancer, lung cancer patients have a better chance of living if the disease is found early.
“This would be a life-changing event for the person in whom we find lung cancer early,” said Borah.
Also, the course of treatment will be different depending on how early the cancer is found.
“It’s impossible to imagine the difference between early-stage lung cancer and late-stage lung cancer. “Your treatment goes from being meant to cure you to what we call palliative care, which means we’ll just keep you going as long as we can,” Borah said.
Sarah Dean, a nurse practitioner at AtlantiCare, said that people who smoke cigarettes for a long time may have regular scans of their chests, but that’s not the case for people who don’t smoke.
For many people, these lung nodules wouldn’t have been found until it was too late.
“Patients wouldn’t have found these unless, for example, they’d been in a car accident or had stomach pain and were getting this scan for something else,” Dean said.
Borah said that after different tests are done, the AI program uses different calculators to give each lung nodule a risk score.
“If the nodule is low risk, they might not need to do anything. Borah said, “Maybe we can just keep an eye on it with regular CT scans.”
Getting the Complete Picture
Borah said that just because a nodule is found doesn’t mean that it is cancer. “There are also a lot of nodules that are not cancerous,” Borah said. “It’s just as important to know when not to do something.”
He said that when AI is used for all the different tests a person can go through, “Even for the smallest thing, we can get a lot more information from all of these tests that can help us catch problems early and give patients better outcomes. Some hospitals in New Jersey are now using AI to find early cancerous growths.
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