INESC TEC leads project to study lung cancer using Artificial Intelligence

The main goal of the LUCCA project, led by INESC TEC and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) is to contribute to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions that enable a more robust and precise support in the decision-making process related to lung cancer.

The project presents a disruptive approach to study lung cancer, proposing a solution to faster and more precise diagnoses, while improving the treatment planning – through personalised therapies. LUCCA also ais to develop more comprehensive research, capable of supporting the characterisation of lung cancer, integrating multiple models of medical data and exploring different level of resource abstraction, due to their distinct features.

 “Lung cancer has been studied has a clinical and pathological phenomenon that involves changes in pulmonary structures”, explained Tânia Pereira. According to the researcher from INESC TEC Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM), and head of project, “thanks to the holistic analysis of physiopathology findings, and considering the automatic recognition of patterns via deep learning techniques, this work focuses on generating models toward a broader analysis”.

 “This project represents a holistic approach to study cancer. The previous works explored single data modalities, often focused exclusively on nodes i.e., tumour cell clusters, without considering other interactions that can be addressed using holistic approaches”, mentioned the researcher.

The integration of several data modalities – including clinical (laboratory data, comorbidities, medicine intake, demographic indicators), image (computerised tomography) and omics (liquid biopsy) data will improve the patient stratification capability, contributing to more reliable diagnoses.

 “This proposal is quite innovative in terms of methodology and application, exploring techniques to improve the generalisation of comprehensive learning algorithms, representing a new approach for cancer characterisation. The integration of multiple information and new liquid biopsy data into learning models will lead to new outlooks on elements involved in cancer progression that have never been studied before”, concluded Tânia Pereira.

The LUCCA project – AI-based Models for Lung Cancer Characterization: a Multimodal and Causal Approach, started in March 2023; it’s funded by the FCT, with an overall budget of €50K.

The researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with INESC TEC.