Chennai: Indian Institute of Technology-Madras Researchers have developed an Artificial Intelligence-based Mathematical Model to identify cancer-causing alterations in cells. The algorithm uses a relatively unexplored technique of leveraging DNA composition to pinpoint genetic alterations responsible for cancer progression, according to a press release.
Cancer is caused due to the uncontrolled growth of cells driven mainly by genetic alterations. In recent years, high-throughput DNA Sequencing has revolutionized the area of cancer research by enabling the measurement of these alterations.
However, due to the complexity and size of these sequencing datasets, pinpointing the exact changes from the genomes of cancer patients is notoriously difficult.
This research was led by Prof B Ravindran, Head, RBCDSAI, and Mindtree Faculty Fellow IIT Madras and Dr Karthik Raman, Faculty Member, Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI (RBCDSAI), IIT Madras, and also the Coordinator, Centre for Integrative Biology and Systems Medicine (IBSE), IIT Madras. Shayantan Banerjee, a Masterās Student at IIT Madras, performed the experiments and analysed the data.
Ravindran said, ‘One of the major challenges faced by cancer researchers involves the differentiation between the relatively small number of ādriverā mutations that enable the cancer cells to grow and the large number of āpassengerā mutations that do not have any effect on the progression of the disease.’