Artificial intelligence and improved early detection for pancreatic cancer

Construction of a comprehensive pancreatic cancer risk assessment program

Due mainly to a late stage at diagnosis and lack of effective treatment modalities, pancreatic cancer (PC) is a highly lethal malignancy with an overall 5-year survival rate of only 12%. Separating patients into those diagnosed with late-stage disease with distant metastases and those diagnosed with localized tumors reveals a striking difference of 3% vs. 44% 5-year survival rates, respectively. Increasing the fraction of patients detected at an early stage, when PC is most likely to be curable, could therefore be of a major benefit. While imaging-based early-detection screening methods (e.g., endoscopic ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging) are increasingly recommended for carriers of germline pathogenic variants in cancer susceptibility genes conferring a high lifetime risk of pancreatic cancer, such screening is not practical in the general population due to the low incidence of PC and a lack of a proven benefit.