CT scans can pinpoint the size, location and spread of a tumor. Epigenetic analysis can track a cancer’s growth and genetic regulation. These different lenses macroscale and microscale really provide different perspectives on the same tumor, says Anant Madabhushi, executive director for the Emory Empathetic AI for Health Institute as well as a researcher at the Winship Cancer Institute.

That’s the goal of four recent studies that promise to produce more accurate cancer risk assessments. Nabil Saba, professor of hematology and oncology in the School of Medicine who collaborated on three of the four studies, says the application of AI to cancer diagnosis is revolutionizing everything we do. If we look at these tools individually, we're missing the bigger, more comprehensive portrait of the tumor, says Madabhushi, senior researcher on all four projects.

It's only when we start to converge these different scales of data at the radiographic scale with the cell scale and the microscopic scale that a true, comprehensive portrait of the complexity of the tumor starts to arise. That’s very important from a translational standpoint because it allows us to understand how the tumor is behaving. The four projects all focus on head and neck cancers, particularly oropharyngeal tumors cancers of the throat. Madabhushi says these are growing at epidemic proportions and exhibit complexities that might benefit from the insights provided by AI.

Head and neck cancer is really a combination of multiple tumors, he says. If they occur in the mouth, those are oral cavity tumors. Then you've got tumors of the oropharynx or oropharyngeal tumors. There’s a whole plethora of different tumors based off the site of incidence within the head and neck. Four teams of researchers used a range of AI models to analyze diverse data. For several cancers, immunohistochemistry, a form of tissue staining that uses antibodies, is often performed to detect and visualize antigens or the proteins that trigger immune responses.

Source: https://news.emory.edu/stories/2025/06/hs_head_and_neck_16-06-2025/story.html