Lung cancer now affects more women than men. To slow the curve of this cancer, screening is being tested in smokers using low-dose breast scans. report.
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The Mag of Health – France 5
Isabelle is between 50 and 74 years old, she smoked almost half a pack of cigarettes a day for forty years. She therefore meets the criteria to participate in a large-scale study into screening for lung cancer in smokers: the Cascade study. This consists of monitoring the lungs of smokers or ex-smokers with low-dose chest scanners.
Explosion of lung cancer in women
The aim of the study is to find out whether generalized screening will one day be possible in France. Because the number of lung cancers in women has been exploding for 20 years.
“These are women who started smoking in the 1970s who now suffer from this problem and it’s on the rise”, To explain Dr. Alexandre Ampère, pulmonologist at the Béthune hospital center. “In the United States, mortality from breast cancer is now lower than from lung cancer. In France it is still slightly lower, but we risk following the trend in the United States”he says.
A radiologist assisted by an artificial intelligence
On the scanners, a non-specialist radiologist looks for any nodules, and at the same time an artificial intelligence also works to identify suspicious lesions. Normally, two specialized radiologists analyze the scanners, but there are too few for national screening.
“We want to show that a non-specialized, trained radiologist, to whom we add an artificial intelligence system, has sufficient quality answers and can only call on an expert for difficult cases”says dr. Jean-Baptiste Faivre, a radiologist.
If the results are conclusive, organized screening for smokers will become possible. The 2,400 patients in the study will undergo a total of three scans if nothing to worry about is detected.
Currently, four centers in France are recruiting patients in Paris, Rennes, Grenoble and Béthune. For more information, contact 06.15.06.58.35 or send one email to cascade.cch@aphp.fr.
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