AI and new surgical techniques improve pancreatic cancer treatments  

Emily Gibbs: After successful surgery for bladder cancer, Jim Blair worried he'd be back in the operating room when testing revealed precancerous cysts in his pancreas.

Jim Blair: I'm getting older. The older you get, the more trouble you have with anesthesia and tolerating surgeries.

Emily Gibbs: But he was relieved to learn surgery wasn't the only option. Dr. Somashekar Krishna, a gastroenterologist at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, uses images of the cysts to determine the best course of treatment. But identifying cancerous risk factors in hundreds of fast-moving video images can be difficult and sometimes inaccurate.

Somashekar Krishna, MD: What we can do is we can slow the video down frame by frame and scroll, and then you can easily pick it up.

Emily Gibbs: To speed up this tedious process, Dr. Krishna is using artificial intelligence.

Somashekar Krishna, MD: We are training the AI to reliably identify, detect, or what we call risk stratify, low versus high risk precancerous lesions, precancerous cysts.

Emily Gibbs: Information that provides a clearer path forward for his patients. For Jim, it was a new minimally invasive procedure, pioneered by Dr. Krishna and his team, that treats the cysts using heat, an alternative to major surgery.

Somashekar Krishna, MD: The thermal energy destroys the inner lining of the cyst, burns the inner lining of the cyst.

Emily Gibbs: Eliminating the threat of pancreatic cancer before it even develops.

Jim Blair: I'm not ready to give it up yet, and so I wondered if there was something else that could be done, let's go get her done.

Emily Gibbs: At The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, I'm Emily Gibbs.