Afraid of endoscopy? Alibaba suggests a way out of an invasive checkup

The artificial intelligence (AI) tool could help catch the cancer at the early stages.

Alibaba Group has created an AI model that can detect early-stage gastric cancer using only CT scans.

The company claims that “Grape” (or the gastric cancer risk assessment procedure) is the first AI system to detect gastric cancer in the world.

The Grape was developed by Alibaba’s Damo Academy and the Zhejiang Cancer Hospital.

The AI tool was created to replace invasive endoscopic testing, which discourages many patients from seeking such checkups.

While traditional screening includes adding a camera down a patient’s throat, Grape analyzes three-dimensional CT scans to spot any signs of early stomach cancer, reports Interesting Engineering.

CT scans haven’t been used to check hollow organs such as the stomach because of changing anatomy.

Nevertheless, the researchers created a large dataset that includes gastric cancer CT images, which allowed AI to see patterns that a radiologist could miss.

This was proven during clinical trials, where Grape reached 85.1% sensitivity and 96.8% specificity.

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The tool was able to detect more cancer cases and rule out false positives. Grape testing also found tumors that doctors missed in some cases.

Gastric cancer is among the types of cancer that are hard to detect, as its symptoms don’t often show until the disease has already spread. Another issue is the fact that people aren’t too keen on going for a check-up, knowing how invasive the procedure is.

This is where Grape comes in, making it much easier for patients to check their health.

The clinical study's scope included almost 100,000 participants in 20 hospitals in China.

This AI model has been trained on thousands of scans, enabling it to notice subtle changes that would go unnoticed by the human eye.

Alibaba Damo Academy shared a real-life example of a person who was diagnosed with late-stage gastric cancer by Grape six months before a radiologist noticed it.

The AI model is now being prepared for a larger use in Zhejiang and Anhui provinces.

Grape is a successor of another AI tool, Damo Panda, that detects pancreatic cancer. With these two AI-powered tools, Damo Academy could change the course of routine health checkups.