A biomedical engineering team at Washington University in St. Louis has begun research on improving colorectal cancer screening tools by combining machine learning and optical coherence tomography.
Optical coherence tomography allows physicians to shine a light into the colon and see deeper to diagnose abnormalities more accurately.
Students used traditional imaging data from optical coherence tomography to teach a machine how to differentiate normal from cancerous colon tissue, according to a university press release.
Combining the two technologies allowed for researchers to diagnose cancerous tissue with 93 percent accuracy.