{"id":599329,"date":"2026-09-13T18:28:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T18:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/599329\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T18:28:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T18:28:21","slug":"ai-tool-accelerates-dosing-predictions-for-prostate-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/599329\/","title":{"rendered":"AI tool accelerates dosing predictions for prostate cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Personalized dosing for late-stage prostate cancer treatments is critical for balancing toxicity with aggressiveness. Yet, dose-prediction models are either fast but inaccurate or accurate but too slow to be clinically useful. A June study published in IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences<\/a> described DiffuDose, a fast AI-biomedical tool that combines the best of both: speed and accuracy.<\/p>\n

Prostate cancer is the second deadliest<\/a> cancer in men in the United States. If caught early, prostate cancer is treatable with a 99 percent<\/a> five-year survival rate. But if caught late and the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, including the liver, lungs, or bones, the survival rates drop significantly.<\/p>\n

In 2022, radiopharmaceutical therapy was approved for use in late-stage prostate cancer patients. Radiopharmaceutical therapy is an injection that uses a cancer-detecting molecule to direct radiation to cancer cells around the body, making it a critical treatment for metastatic cancer.<\/p>\n

Radiopharmaceutical therapy helps track disease progression because the treatment’s radiation emits gamma rays. These rays can be imaged with a SPECT scanner<\/a>, similar to a PET or CT scanner, allowing doctors to see how radiation is distributed in the body. Traditionally, these scans are taken after each dose of radiopharmaceutical therapy and used to personalize the next dose based on the patient’s response. However, traditional dose prediction is fast but assumes all organs are the same size and shape, obscuring the body’s complexity. In contrast, the gold-standard method simulates radiation particle by particle, making it extremely accurate but taking hours per patient.<\/p>\n

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst leveraged their AI expertise to develop DiffuDose, which calculates personalized late-stage prostate cancer doses in under a minute.<\/p>\n

DiffuDose is the first diffusion-model-based system to predict personalized organ radiation dose maps from a patient’s SPECT and CT scans. Because diffusion models can be slow, the researchers built the system with two AI modules to speed it up. One uses a compressed, lower-resolution space to produce a \u201crough draft\u201d of the dose map, and another turns that draft into a detailed, full-scale patient dose map.<\/p>\n

DiffuDose generated personalized doses more accurately than six other predictive models and approached the accuracy of the current gold standard in under a minute. It also consistently performed better across multiple tissues and organs, especially those at high risk for toxicity – both kidneys and liver- which can help guide safer treatment.<\/p>\n

DiffuDose was modeled off single SPECT scans for each patient. In reality, patients undergo multiple rounds of therapy, with scans and dose adjustments each time. To improve its clinical impact and patient outcomes, the researchers aim to train DiffuDose on multiple time-point scans in the future.<\/p>\n

Sources: IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences<\/a>, BAMF Health<\/a>, American Cancer Society<\/a>, American Cancer Society<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Personalized dosing for late-stage prostate cancer treatments is critical for balancing toxicity with aggressiveness. Yet, dose-prediction models are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[134,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-599329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}