In front of a computer, oncologists can sit for hours and manually draw hearts, lungs, and other organs on a CT image.
In the program on the PC, one can scroll through hundreds of CT images, all carefully planned and manually. not even.
With the help of artificial intelligence, the cancer department can spend less time on such tasks.
– Take more than 100 unique pictures of the body in a CT scan. Previous owners, we hand painted every member and every structure. An oncologist in training can spend up to a working day charting this, says Ove Fremsæter, a radiation therapist at Ålesund Hospital.
The new program means oncologists can spend several hours doing it in a few minutes.
– How does this affect patients?
– Patients are not directly affected today. The treatment they received yesterday was as good as the one they would receive tomorrow. The path to the goal is only shorter, says Nils Schottner, chief of radiotherapy at Alesund..
Nils Schutner with the radiotherapy machine they are using in Ålesund.
Photo: Jonas Otneim/NRK
New sick tsunami
The chief medical officer in the cancer ward, Cecily Soma Nordstrand, spent a lot of time manually mapping organs using CT images.
Cecily Soma Nordstrand is the chief medical officer in the cancer ward. The goal of the program is to give her more time to do other things for the patient.
Photo: Jonas Otneim/NRK
A lot of time is saved with the help of the program. We are of course at the beginning of the project, but the goal is to improve quality and save time, which means we can process more people, says the president.
The time saved means that oncologists can spend more time getting to know each patient better, treating more, and developing new treatments.
– We also know that there will be a tsunami of new patients, and this is a plan to deal with a larger number of patients. So it’s a way to prepare for the aging wave, says Nordstrand.
evolve more
Ålesund Hospital in collaboration with St. Olav’s Hospital in Trondheim is the first hospital in Norway to train an artificial intelligence to be used in this way.
So far, AI is used clinically only for left-sided breast cancer patients. But there is nothing stopping it from expanding into other forms of cancer.
Medical physicist Christopher Lervag demonstrates how radiation will strike a patient on a recorded tomogram.
Photo: Jonas Otneim/NRK
– What’s really exciting are the possibilities that open up when this technology is now in place. In the future, we may be able to customize the treatment every day, reduce side effects and increase the effect of radiotherapy, The triumph of medical physicist Christopher Lervag.
They are now adapting the AI to work on the right breast as well and developing similar intelligence for prostate cancer patients.
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