The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) www.fnih.org received a $2.4 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) www.arnoldfoundation.org to support a nationwide “Coding for Cancer™” competition focused on improving the accuracy of lung cancer screenings.
Screening often produce false-positives when the observed finding is not due to lung cancer. The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) www.cancer.gov National Lung Screening Trial, compared low dose helical CT scans to standard X-rays and found that initial positive screening results were incorrect about 95 percent of the time.
According to NCI Director Harold Varmus, M.D, “The procedure remains marred by many false positive readings. We hope that the grant funding from LJAF will attract people from many disciplines to look for new methods so that the scans will be more accurate”.
Inaccurate results can cause a considerable amount of stress for patients and may require more money to be spent on costly follow-up screenings. The “Coding for Cancer Lung Cancer” Challenge designed and coordinated by the NCI’s Cancer Imaging Program will offer up to $1.8 million in prizes.
One of the competitions will ask coders to create the best computer algorithm able to identify a person as having lung cancer based on two sets of images taken one to two year apart when the scans may show the growth of a tumor. Another challenge will ask coders to create algorithms that can spot lung cancer based on one set of images taken from a single scan or study.
The challenges now being offered as part of the “Coding for Cancer” Initiative is looking for researchers in other fields such as facial recognition or satellite imagery to spur innovation in cancer detection methods. LJAF will commit $1.8 million in a second imaging competition to enable Sage Bionetworks http://sagebase.org, a nonprofit research institute, to focus on reducing false negatives in breast cancer screening.
The challenges are expected to be opened early next year. Details of the registration process and rules for the competition will be announced at a later date.