Artificial intelligence in cancer research, a guide

A new article recently published on Nature Review Cancer shows the multiple benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in cancer research, highlighting how its applications in image analysis, natural language processing and drug discovery can be useful for new scientific discoveries.

As authors say, AI tools are becoming increasingly common in cancer research, «Hence, we postulate that any cancer researcher nowadays needs to acquire a certain level of AI literacy. Today, it is important to be able to understand, interpret and critically evaluate the AI output». Through a wide set of examples, the review shows how AI-based tools can boost research productivity in daily workflows, but can also extract hidden information from existing data, thereby enabling new scientific discoveries: by explaining deep learning types and neural network architectures, authors demonstrate how AI methods can help in microscopy image analysis, in getting more informations from histopathology or in identifying and quantifying biomarkers from images; thanks to natural language processing and generative AI, AI can be used not only rephrase, summarize or translate text but also synthesize new text, boosting productivity; moreover, it can be extremely useful in drug discovery and clinical trial optimization. «The rapid advancements in AI, driven by substantial hardware and algorithm improvements, hint at an exciting future. It is advisable that cancer researchers become familiar with these tools and develop an intuition about the potential and the limitations of contemporaneous AI so that they are able to navigate a world in which AI-based tools are ubiquitously used», authors conclude.