“In this case, it is important to know that if you detect lung cancer at an early stage, the long-term outcome is significantly better. Your five-year survival rate is closer to 70%, whereas if you catch it at an advanced stage, the five-year survival rate is just under 10%. “, he added.
Although new therapies have been introduced in recent years to combat lung cancer, the majority of patients with this cancer still succumb to the disease. Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) of the lungs is currently the most common way to screen for lung cancer, in hopes of catching it in the earliest stages when it can still be surgically removed.
The tool, dubbed “Sybil”, in reference to the oracles of ancient Greece, also known as sibyls, takes screening even further by analyzing data from “LDCT” images without the help of a radiologist to predict a patient’s risk of developing future lung cancer within six years.
In their new paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers at the Jameel Clinic demonstrated that the ‘Sybil’ tool achieved C indices of 0.75, 0.81 and 0.80 over a six-year period. from various sets of lung LDCT scans. Models with a C index greater than 0.7 are considered good and greater than 0.8 strong.