Using AI to Fight Brain Tumors

The study could help lead to more individualized care for glioblastoma patients. Danielle Lawry

For years, cancer researchers have noticed that more men than women get a lethal form of brain cancer called glioblastoma and that the tumors are often more aggressive in men. UW–Madison scientists are turning to artificial intelligence to learn more about those risk factors.

Pallavi Tiwari, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and radiology, leverages the computational power of AI models to probe large volumes of medical images. She’s looking for patterns that could help oncologists and their patients make better-informed decisions.

Glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer, with a median survival of 15 months after diagnosis.

According to Tiwari, “a big challenge is prognosis — identifying how long patients are actually going to live and what their outcome is likely to be. This is important because the outcomes ultimately govern the treatments that they’re getting and their quality of life after diagnosis.”

Tiwari and former graduate student Ruchika Verma built an AI model that can identify even subtle patterns in pathology slides that might never be apparent to the naked eye. Using data from more than 250 studies of glioblastoma patients, they trained the model to recognize tumors’ unique characteristics, such as the abundance of certain cell types and the degree to which they invade surrounding healthy tissue.

The model identified tumor characteristics that appear to translate to worse prognoses for both men and women.

The study could help lead to more individualized care for glioblastoma patients.

Published in the Spring 2025 issue