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Guerbet wins PI-CAI Grand Challenge on detection of prostate cancer

Guerbet wins PI-CAI Grand Challenge on detection of prostate cancer

Villepinte, 17 July 2023: Guerbet (FR0000032526 GBT), a global specialist in contrast media and medical imaging solutions, is delighted to announce the success of its teams at the PI-CAI (Prostate Imaging: Cancer Al) Grand Challenge¹, an international challenge organised by a consortium² of radiology opinion leaders in prostate imaging, urologists and artificial intelligence experts, to compare the performance of artificial intelligence algorithms in the detection of prostate cancer.

Diagnosis of prostate cancer, a public health issue

The second male cancer according to the WHO, prostate cancer, with 1.4 million new cases each year worldwide, accounts for 6.8% of male cancer-related deaths (350,000 deaths per year). Currently, only 10% to 20% of patients are diagnosed at a stage where the tumour is resectable.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an increasingly important role in the early diagnosis of prostate cancer. The European Association of Urology recommends MRI before considering a biopsy. However, prostate MRI is difficult to interpret and requires a good level of expertise to avoid the high variability of interpretations and diagnostic errors highlighted in some studies.³

However, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, it is possible to develop a machine learning system that uses supervised learning algorithms trained using large volumes of medical data from patients with suspected prostate cancer. By training artificial intelligence on these data, it becomes possible to create a model capable of detecting the early signs of prostate cancer.

The PI-CAI Grand Challenge, a competition to advance the diagnosis of prostate cancer

The PI-CAI Grand Challenge, launched in November 2022 on the detection of prostate cancer, aims to encourage technological advances in early diagnosis and accurate detection of prostate cancer and to evaluate the performance of participants' artificial intelligence algorithms.

Bringing together more than 320 academic and industrial teams, including Guerbet, each invited to submit an artificial intelligence algorithm capable of diagnosing more than 10,000 prostate MRI examinations in order to be compared to diagnoses of radiologists specialised in prostate imaging.

The PI-CAI Grand Challenge was divided into two stages. During the first stage, the organisation proposed that the participating teams train their algorithm on approximately 1,500 data, which was then tested by the organisers on a cohort of internal data from 1,000 patients. It was at the Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) 2022 in Chicago that the Guerbet team was recognised, ranking first and second according to performance metrics