Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence which can differentiate cancer cells from normal cells, as well as detect the very early stages of viral infection inside cells. The findings, published today in a study in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence , pave the way for improved diagnostic techniques and new monitoring strategies for disease. The researchers are from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and the Fundación Biofisica Bizkaia (FBB, located in Biofisika Institute).
The tool, AINU (AI of the NUcleus), scans high-resolution images of cells. The images are obtained with a special microscopy technique called STORM, which creates a picture that captures many finer details than what regular microscopes can see. The high-definition snapshots reveal structures at nanoscale resolution.
A nanometer (nm) is one-billionth of a meter, and a strand of human hair is about 100,000nm wide. The AI can detect rearrangements inside cells as small as 20nm, or 5,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. These alterations are too small and subtle for human observers to find with traditional methods alone.
"The resolution of these images is powerful enough for our AI to recognize specific patterns and differences with remarkable accuracy, including changes in how DNA is arranged inside cells, helping spot alterations very soon after they occur. We think that, one day,.