Feb 27 2019
Scientists belonging to various disciplines from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) in Dallas have created revolutionary technology to identify melanoma cells that probably will metastasize to other parts of the body using artificial intelligence (AI).
The method, known as “quantitative live cell histology”, was revealed recently at the American Society for Cell Biology/EMBO conference in San Diego by Dr. Assaf Zaritsky, of the BGU Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering, and UTSU Prof. Gaudenz Danuser.
The technology captures video of cells using microscopic cameras and recognizes the appearance and behavioral patterns of those cells that have the potential to be metastatic.
The team showed that their depiction of the functional state of individual cells can foretell the probability that a stage III melanoma, with malignancies restricted to the lymphatic system, will progress to stage IV, in which the cancer has spread from the main area to all other areas of the patient’s body.
Beyond metastasis prediction potential, the computer models also allowed us to distinguish between cancer cells taken from different patients by quantifying factors that are not visible to the naked eye.
Dr. Assaf Zaritsky, Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering, BGU.