Francesco Ciompi and Chella van der Post receive Hanarth Foundation grant to improve detection of diffuse gastric cancer

Francesco Ciompi and Chella van der Post received a grant from the Hanarth foundation for their 4-year research project to improve histopathological detection of hereditary diffuse gastric cancer (HDGC) using artificial intelligence (AI).

Within the project entitled "Unmasking the invisible cancer: digital detection of diffuse-type gastric carcinomas", they will develop AI methods to refine DGC diagnostics. Since DGC may be easily missed or hard to find on biopsies and prophylactic hereditary gastrectomy specimens, AI will aid the pathologist in the diagnostic work-up, improving the detection of relevant cell types among a very large set of slides, with high potential to improve cancer diagnostics. Furthermore, the automation in cell detection provided by AI algorithms will allow to quantitatively and objectively assess DGC patterns in large series of slides, potentially giving new insights in specific morphological features of DGC, such as patterns of spatial cell distributions.

With this project, researchers aim at using AI to better identify and classify future patients with HDGC. This will result in better patient stratification for therapeutic options and clinical decisions, abd will give more insight into specific features of DGC, both in a hereditary as well as sporadic setting. All AI technology that will be developed in this project will be made publicly accessible for research purposes.