Google says AI can help diagnose cancer early and support treatment
&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Google says AI can help diagnose cancer early and support treatment")
Google says AI can help diagnose cancer early and support treatment Photograph: (Google | MIT)
Google says AI is helping fight cancer by improving early detection, diagnosis, and research. Tools like AlphaFold and AI-powered scans support doctors, reduce paperwork, and speed up treatment, making cancer care more efficient and accurate.
Google says AI can help make cancer more manageable and save lives
AI role in early detection and treatment
Google says artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping in the fight against cancer and could play an even larger role in the future. From early detection to improving diagnosis, patient care, and research, AI is becoming a key tool in healthcare.
The remarks came from Google executive Ruth Porat, who has survived cancer twice. She addressed medical professionals and highlighted how AI can support diagnosis, speed up treatment, and ease administrative tasks.
Porat said that, much like electricity and the internet, AI is a “general purpose technology” that can bring wide economic and social benefits. She further added that AI has the potential to transform cancer care by helping doctors detect illness earlier and spend more time with patients.
Accelerating research with AI
One of the biggest examples is AlphaFold, an AI system developed by Google’s DeepMind that can predict the structure of proteins. This tool has already been used by over 2.5 million scientists in 190 countries and is helping speed up cancer research by identifying how diseases behave and how drugs can target them.
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Porat also mentioned how AI is being used to analyse high-resolution pathology slides and medical scans. Google’s models can spot small cancer cells missed during reviews, giving pathologists more accurate tools to work with. This approach combines the strength of human knowledge and machine precision.
Improving delivery and supporting clinicians
Google is working with the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) on an AI-powered guidelines assistant. This tool helps doctors find reliable, structured information quickly, reducing the time spent reading lengthy medical papers.
Porat said doctors lose up to 28 hours per week to paperwork. AI tools can now summarise exam notes, suggest treatments, help schedule appointments, and even support clinical trials. Some systems are already reducing time spent on discharge summaries by up to 40 per cent.
She added that AI can also help defend hospitals against cybersecurity threats, as healthcare systems are frequent targets of data breaches.
