Artificial intelligence helps reduce cancer drugs’ toxicity

Machine learning techniques can adjust dosage of cancer drugs and improve quality of life

The most poignant images of a cancer patient perhaps are the ones of hair loss. Artificial intelligence can change that.

MIT researchers are employing novel machine-learning techniques to reduce toxic chemotherapy and radiotherapy dosing for glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer.

Glioblastoma is a malignant tumor that appears in the brain or spinal cord, and prognosis for adults is no more than five years. Patients must endure a combination of radiation therapy and multiple drugs taken every month. Medical professionals generally administer maximum safe drug doses to shrink the tumor as much as possible. But these strong pharmaceuticals still cause debilitating side effects in patients.

In a paper being presented next week at the 2018 Machine Learning for Healthcare conference at Stanford University, MIT Media Lab researchers detail a model that could make dosing regimens less toxic but still effective. Powered by a “self-learning” machine-learning technique, the model looks at treatment regimens currently in use, and iteratively adjusts the doses.

“We kept the goal, where we have to help patients by reducing tumor sizes but, at the same time, we want to make sure it doesn’t lead to overwhelming sickness and harmful side effects”

Eventually, it finds an optimal treatment plan, with the lowest possible potency and frequency of doses that should still reduce tumor sizes to a degree comparable to that of traditional regimens.

“We kept the goal, where we have to help patients by reducing tumor sizes but, at the same time, we want to make sure the quality of life — the dosing toxicity — doesn’t lead to overwhelming sickness and harmful side effects,” says Pratik Shah, a principal investigator at the Media Lab who supervised this research.

The paper’s first author is Media Lab researcher Gregory Yauney.

The researchers’ model uses a technique called reinforced learning (RL), a method inspired by behavioral psychology, in which a model learns to favor certain behavior that leads to a desired outcome.

The technique comprises artificially intelligent “agents” that complete “actions” in an unpredictable, complex environment to reach a desired “outcome.” Whenever it completes an action, the agent receives a “reward” or “penalty,” depending on whether the action works toward the outcome. Then, the agent adjusts its actions accordingly to achieve that outcome.

The researchers adapted an RL model for glioblastoma treatments that use a combination of the drugs temozolomide (TMZ) and procarbazine, lomustine, and vincristine (PVC), administered over weeks or months.