Portuguese Institute creates software for diagnosis of cancer … – Economic

Researchers at the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC) created a software to help physicians in the diagnosis of diseases such as breast and prostate cancer. ExpertBayes is the software name released today, the eve of World Cancer Research Day, which is celebrated tomorrow.

The aim of ExpertBayes is to integrate medical knowledge with Machine Learning techniques (machine learning) in graphical models , to estimate more accurately the risk of breast or prostate cancer after biopsied in order to reduce the problem of error biopsy sampling.

This software is part of ABLE project (Advice based Learning), led by a researcher at INESC TEC and lecturer at the Faculty of Science, University of Porto (FCUP) Inês Dutra, and received a financing of over 88,000 euros by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT).

for two years – from 2013 to 2015 – 737 patients underwent screening examinations of cancers, 496 prostate and 348 breast, taking into account various attributes of each, such as age, weight the
family history, among others.

This software is prepared to work with any data type, not necessarily only those that relate to cancers. However, for this specific case the processed data relate to prostate cancer, removed from the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and breast, assigned by Elizabeth Burnside, a specialist in hospital breast cancer at the University of Wisconsin -Madison (USA) and co-author of the work that was published on the ExpertBayes.

In Portugal are detected each year about 4,500 new cases of breast cancer, leading to the death of about 1,500 women. In the case of prostate cancer, the statistics do not differ substantially,
once every year brings about four thousand new cases.

“The acceptance by the health professionals was very positive, since, if in doubt, to make diagnosis, ExpertBayes helps them make the best decision.

Some of this software is now available in Dataias application and will be marketed by the company NLPC Lda in the context of a project IAPMEI and NLPC company www.dataias.com “explains Ezilda Almeida, one of the researchers of the Center for Research in Advanced Computing Systems (CRACS) INESC TEC, responsible for the development of this technology.