Submitted by Catherine Atkins on Tue, 15/04/2025 - 15:24
At the University of Cambridge, AI is being used to tackle some of the most pressing issues facing humanity. And scientists at the Early Cancer Institute are at the forefront of this machine intelligence revolution, harnessing its power to diagnose hard to detect cancers, such as kidney cancer, as well as using it to predict how cancer patients will respond to treatment.
Dawn, the UK’s fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer has been built by the University of Cambridge's Research Computing Service, Intel and Dell Technologies.
Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre-funded PhD student Bill McGough, a researcher at the Early Cancer Institute, is using it to investigate the use of AI to sift through patients’ Computerised Tomography (CT) scans. Traditionally analysed by a human radiographer, which is time-consuming, labour intensive and costly, Bill's findings suggest that a deep learning diagnostic tool, after being trained using doctors’ medical expertise, could reach the same level of accuracy reading kidney CT scans as radiologists. This could pave the way for a viable kidney screening programme for at-risk individuals.
Bill's work is just one of the many applications of AI and machine learning, across a broad spectrum of research fields, that are being explored using Dawn's immense power.
Click here to read more about AI in research at Cambridge.