Big data

Health care

Biology

Identification (biology)

Cancer detection

Economics

Data mining

Computer science

Botany

Drug discovery

Bioinformatics

Precision medicine

Internal medicine

Artificial intelligence

Cancer therapy

Medicine

Economic growth

Cancer drugs

Cancer

Machine learning

Pathology

Cancer treatment

Nature reviews. Cancer

Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are breaking into biomedical research and health care, which importantly includes cancer research and oncology, where the potential applications are vast. These include detection and diagnosis of cancer, subtype classification, optimization of cancer treatment and identification of new therapeutic targets in drug discovery. While big data used to train machine learning models may already exist, leveraging this opportunity to realize the full promise of artificial intelligence in both the cancer research space and the clinical space will first require significant obstacles to be surmounted. In this Viewpoint article, we asked four experts for their opinions on how we can begin to implement artificial intelligence while ensuring standards are maintained so as transform cancer diagnosis and the prognosis and treatment of patients with cancer and to drive biological discovery.

Artificial intelligence in cancer research, diagnosis and therapy