Cancer is one of the UK’s biggest killers. Could artificial intelligence put a stop to this? Yessi Bello Perez investigates.
By the time you finish reading this article, five people in the UK will have been diagnosed with cancer*. Here’s another scary thought: by 2020, 47% of people – that’s almost one in two – will get the disease at some point in their lives.
Depressingly, 356,860 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in the UK in 2014 alone, and although survival rates have doubled over the past four decades, 160,000 people still perish from the disease every year.
Tech giants such as Microsoft are already looking for ways to cure the disease and although the firm undoubtedly has the necessary resources to research a cure and potentially disrupt the diagnosis process, the question is whether technology startups are also well-placed to achieve the same objective....