Andreas Charalambous, Associate Professor of Oncology and Palliative Care at the Cyprus University of Technology, presented the INCISIVE project at the European Lung Cancer Congress. The venue was virtually held from the 28th of March to the 2nd of April 2022.

Charalambous focused his presentation on the Lung Cancer Pilot study, in which he is participating together with clinical partners from Cyprus, Greece and Italy in the INCISIVE project. Before presenting the aim of the study, he described the main challenges in lung cancer diagnosis and screening. On the one hand, he explained that delays in diagnosis might be a contributing factor in the high frequency of advanced disease at presentation, and the overlap in symptoms, such as cough, chest pain, fatigue, or weight loss, might lead to delay in recognition of a lung cancer diagnosis. On the other hand, he highlighted that cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) reduces cancer mortality but requires several challenges, such as the quality of screening and specific training of radiologists. He also highlighted the advantages that the INCISIVE system brings to the field of cancer diagnosis and screening the most important being the ability to combine data from multiple sources, contributing this way to a more comprehensive imaging result.

The overall aim of the INCISIVE Lung Pilot is the accurate detection of malignant, non-small-cell lung cancer lesions (NSCLC), with a possible extension of the diagnostic capabilities of the models to solitary lung nodules in the prospective pilots. The pilot will be deployed in two phases. Firstly, an observational study will be performed where the INCISIVE processing pipelines will be used retrospectively to evaluate the proposed system performance and identify novel, potentially valuable prognostic markers. Secondly, a short interventional study with a small number of participants will allow the use of the INCISIVE AI tools in practice, thus providing additional summative evaluation data for the developed techniques.

About lung cancer

According to the last report ‘Health at a Glance’ published by the OECD and the European Union in 2020, in Europe, lung cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed form of cancer after prostate cancer among men and the third most common cancer after breast and colorectal cancer among women. Despite the advances in the prognosis of breast and colorectal cancer, lung cancer continues to be associated with relatively low survival after diagnosis.

Almost all types of lung cancer are carcinomas, and they are divided into two main groups: small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The pilot study is focused on this last type of cancer, which is the most common, representing 85% of all lung cancers.