Inify Laboratories has announced a new partnership with the ProMort research team at Karolinska Institutet, aimed at transforming prostate cancer diagnostics. The primary objective of this collaboration is to improve the precision of prostate cancer diagnosis through AI-driven image analysis.
The ProMort program is a multi-disciplinary, international research project aiming to develop new, high-performing prognostic tools for prostate cancer that can be implemented in clinical practice and help tailoring the right treatment to the right patient. It aims to:
- identify molecular factors associated with prostate cancer death, using tumour tissue from diagnostic biopsies
- identify novel histopathological features associated with prostate cancer death using standard pathological review and artificial intelligence (AI)
- improve prognostication in prostate cancer by combining clinical variables with the outcomes of aims 1-2 in a new prognostic tool.
Olof Akre, Professor of Oncological Surgery at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery at Karolinska Institutet commented: “When our ProMort team started the discussions with Inify, we quickly realised the power of their organisation and technology. A collaboration has great potential to further advance the important work of identifying markers to determine the degree of malignancy in prostate cancer, while also maintaining a high and consistent quality. I am delighted with this partnership and look forward to combining great AI models with talented people.”
During the project, Inify’s AI development platform will be used to annotate different prostate cancer growth patterns with focus on cribriform structures, perineural invasion and reactive stroma. This will be used as an input to train AI models that can accurately identify and outline these structures and thereby speed up the diagnostic process as well as laying the foundation for a more streamlined result with less intra- and interobserver variation.
“The ultimate ground truth for training diagnostic AI applications is patient outcome. This research project presents a unique opportunity to find hitherto undetected or unverified correlations between histopathological features and patient outcomes. We are proud to contribute to this important project that is very much in line with Inify’s own research strategy”, comments Arto Järvinen, CTO, Inify Laboratories.