“It will be anticipated that such a model would improve the present landscape,” he says. “But it surely really must be very early to make the largest impact.”

It’s possible that some people could have developed advanced pancreatic cancer inside the six-to-18-month window, meaning it may very well be too late to treat them effectively by the point they’ve received a risk assessment, he says.

While this particular study is retrospective, taking a look at existing data and tasking the models with making hypothetical predictions, the team has began work on a study that can gather gather data on existing patients, compute their risk aspects, and wait to see how accurate the predictions are, says Martin Rinard, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who worked on the project.

Prior to now, other AI models built with data from a specific hospital sometimes didn’t work as well when supplied with data from one other hospital, he points out. That may very well be all the way down to every kind of reasons, comparable to different populations, procedures, and practices.

“Because we now have what’s coming near data from essentially a really significant fraction of your entire population of america, we now have hopes that the model will work higher across organizations and never be tied to a selected organization,” he says. “And since we’re working with so many organizations, it also gives us a much bigger training set.”

In the longer term, PRISM may very well be deployed in two ways, says Appelbaum.

First, it could help single out patients for pancreatic cancer testing. Second, it could offer a broader form of screening, prompting people without symptoms to take a blood or saliva test that will indicate whether or not they need further testing.

“There are tens of 1000’s of those models for various cancers on the market, but most of them are stuck within the literature,” she adds. “I feel we now have the pathway to take them to clinical practice, which is why I began all of this—in order that we are able to actually get it to people and detect cancer early. It has the potential to avoid wasting many, many lives.”