Mayo Clinic’s AI-assisted test model can detect pancreatic cancer up to three years early, offering patients more time for curative treatment.
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Minnesota’s world-renowned Mayo Clinic continues to live up to its reputation for achieving medical miracles, announcing Wednesday it has developed a test to detect pancreatic cancer up to three years before a patient receives a diagnosis.
The AI-assisted test model helps specialists identify early signs of the disease before tumors visibly develop, lending more time for patients to seek curative treatment.
The new model is the result of multiple years of research dedicated to earlier cancer detection,
“The greatest barrier to saving lives from pancreatic cancer has been our inability to see the disease when it is still curable,” says Ajit Goenka, M.D., the study’s senior author, and a Mayo Clinic radiologist and nuclear medicine specialist. “This AI can now identify the signature of cancer from a normal-appearing pancreas, and it can do so reliably over time and across diverse clinical settings.”
The study, which was published in the medical journal Gut, reviewed approximately 2,000 CT scans, including those from patients later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. While the scans were initially interpreted as “normal,” Mayo said its new tool helped doctors detect prediagnostic cancers at nearly double the rate of specialists examining the scans without using AI.
Further, the study showed scans obtained and reviewed by the AI tool more than two years before an official diagnosis were three times more effective in identifying early cancers.
Researchers completed the study as part of the Mayo Clinic’s Precure initiative, a program intended to help health care providers predict and prevent diseases by learning early biological changes in the body — before symptoms begin.