The Brain Tumour Charity champion from Waterlooville welcomes AI's potential to help tailor treatment for most common adult brain tumour
Hampshire man heralds potential of AI to help tailor brain tumour treatment
A Waterlooville man has welcomed the results of research which has shown that artificial intelligence (AI) could help with the type of brain tumour he was diagnosed with in 2017.
Andy Tudor, a retired defence systems engineer from Waterlooville, was diagnosed with a meningioma nine years ago which was successfully removed through surgery. The tumour then recurred five years later with Andy undergoing Gamma knife radiotherapy to kill the cells.
He is now an Involvement Champion at The Brain Tumour Charity which has funded a study into a new tool that uses AI to analyse images of tumour tissue. Scientists at the University of Toronto and Mayo clinic pioneered the tool which can provide doctors with reliable information in less than an hour.
The research has shown it could help identify types of meningioma that have a high risk of growing back quickly after surgery and may therefore benefit from earlier, more aggressive treatment.
Andy said: “It’s fantastic to see technologies like AI being used in such a positive way. I very much welcome its potential to help tailor meningioma treatment, which could prove a massive benefit for people like me in the future.”
The findings of the research were published in The Lancet Digital Health and according to The Brain Charity Trust they suggest that AI can provide the “same level of insight into meningioma biology and behaviour as expensive molecular tools” which are only available at select institutions.
A spokesperson for The Brain Tumour Charity said: “Results showed the AI tool could reliably classify meningiomas into molecular groups, achieving up to 97% accuracy. A growing body of work shows that these groups can help doctors give a more accurate prognosis and personalised treatment plan than more traditional approaches.
“The models developed in this study are now being made publicly available. Researchers hope they can be a useful decision support tool for clinicians, while validation for wider use is ongoing.”
Dr Alexander Landry, neurosurgery resident and PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and the study’s first author, said: “Previously, expensive genetic profiling was needed to reliably predict how these tumours would behave, and how well they’d respond to treatment. With this new study, such information becomes available to all patients with a meningioma. Our main hope is that it will pave the way for better treatment decisions.”
Senior author, Dr Gelareh Zadeh, a neurosurgeon at Mayo Clinic and a recipient of The Brain Tumour Charity’s Quest for Cures grant, added: “This study underlines the huge potential of AI to support meningioma diagnosis and treatment. By helping us overcome the cost and resource limitations associated with molecular tools, it could make a real difference.”
More details on the study, which was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research alongside The Brain Tumour Charity, can be found here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(26)00009-9/fulltext