Nadya Karpova

A new AI model developed by researchers at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute and ETH Zurich’s Department of Health Science and Technology can identify genes that have been altered, such as ones that might be causing a disease, in a cell just by analyzing an image of the cell’s chromatin — the dense package of chromosomes inside the cell’s nucleus.

Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a pre-invasive tumor, accounts for about 25 percent of breast cancer diagnoses, a leading cause of cancer death. While doctors generally recommend treatment, they lack the appropriate evidence to reliably decide which tumor will remain benign and which might turn into a life-threatening invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), resulting in high rates of overtreatment.