Working with a Boston-based startup, Taiwan medical teams have developed the first-ever AI-powered tumor auto-contouring solution, which will help doctors identify brain tumors in just minutes. This system automatically maps the contours of tumors inside the brain - a necessary step before treatment can be applied for brain cancer. Not only can it save doctors valuable time, it''s much more precise than doing it by hand. Formosa News reporter Stephany Yang has the story.

Stephany Yang
Formosa News reporter
In about three minutes, this AI system can detect brain tumors.

To treat brain cancer, doctors must first precisely map out where the tumors are in the brain, in a process called contouring. Doing so manually can take hours. But a new fully automated solution developed by a startup can shorten the process to just a few minutes. This system, called VBrain, was developed with data from National Taiwan University Hospital.

Xiao Fu-ren
National Taiwan University Hospital
National Taiwan University Hospital has used radiosurgery to treat more than 3,000 patients in the past 10 years. For these patients, we had doctors contour the tumors on each medical image. With this data from National Taiwan University Hospital, we were able to train the AI system.

VBrain has been tested at multiple sites in the U.S. and Taiwan, including NTU Hospital. One finding was that VBrain was able to improve contouring accuracy, identifying lesions missed by the human eye.

Hsu Feng-ming
National Taiwan University Hospital
Because brain metastases are carried by blood to the brain, there are often a lot of them. If the doctor doesn''t pay attention to that, the smaller ones may be missed. With the help of AI, we found some tumors in several patients that we hadn''t noticed before.

Xiao Fu-ren
National Taiwan University Hospital
We found that doctors can save about a third of their time with the help of this system. The second thing is that accuracy is improved - that is, because some of our doctors have more experience or specialize in radiosurgery, while others are less experienced and may not draw the tumor boundary that well, or may miss one or two tumors. This system can help us improve the accuracy of contouring tumors. It can help improve accuracy by about 10 to 20%.

The solution has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to perform auto-contouring to the three most common types of brain tumors: metastasis, brain meningioma, and acoustic neuroma.