Picked and checked by David Michaelson
Every CT scan in a Mayo Clinic study had already been read as normal. An AI model went back through them and caught 73% of the pancreatic cancers hiding there, a median of 475 days before diagnosis.
IN THIS ISSUE
Pancreatic Cancer Spotted 475 Days Before Diagnosis
Teachers Saved 49 Minutes a Week, With No Drop in Quality
// BREAKTHROUGHS
Breakthroughs
Hidden Signals, Found Early
MAYO CLINIC . RADIOLOGY
Pancreatic Cancer Spotted 475 Days Before Diagnosis
Ajit Harishkumar Goenka's team in Mayo Clinic's radiology department went back to CT scans taken 3 to 36 months before 219 patients were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Every scan had been read as normal. Their model, REDMOD, measures tissue texture instead of looking for a mass. It caught 73% of the cancers, against 39% for radiologists reading the same scans, a median of 475 days before diagnosis, while correctly clearing 81% to 87.5% of healthy scans.
The study, published in Gut in April, is retrospective. A prospective trial called AI-PACED will test the model in high-risk patients first.
The greatest barrier to saving lives from pancreatic cancer has been our inability to see the disease when it is still curable.
The first people to see this in a clinic will be those with new-onset diabetes, the group the AI-PACED trial enrolls.
ALSO THIS WEEK
A Spectrometer That Tunes Itself Aarhus University researchers let a home-built NMR spectrometer learn its own microwave pulse sequences by trial on the real sample, and on the harder of two test systems the sequence it found gave around 70% more signal than their reference method.
// EVERYDAY UPGRADES
Everyday Upgrades
A Trial Timed Teachers' Planning
OAK NATIONAL ACADEMY . ENGLAND
Teachers Saved 49 Minutes a Week, With No Drop in Quality
A randomized trial followed 464 primary teachers across 108 schools in England through a term of lesson planning with Aila, Oak National Academy's publicly funded AI lesson assistant. Teachers using it saved an average of 49 minutes a week, with no difference in the quality of their resources. The Education Endowment Foundation funded the trial, and the National Foundation for Educational Research evaluated it independently.
Teachers used Aila for only about 7% of lessons and still saved the time. The gain was largest for teachers new to the profession or less sure of their subject.
Teachers saved the time by handing over only the lessons they would otherwise build from scratch, about 7% of them.
ALSO THIS WEEK
Heavy AI Scribe Users Cut 2.5 Minutes per Note At Beth Israel Lahey Health, a study of 902 clinicians and more than 1.6 million visits found heavy users of an AI scribe spent about 2.5 fewer minutes per encounter with notes open, though after-hours charting and productivity didn't improve.
Faster Tasks, Same Week for UK Teachers In a YouGov survey of 1,033 UK teachers for Bett, 51% of AI users said it cut their workload but only 35% said they actually work fewer hours.
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positivelyAI is picked and checked by David Michaelson at EmbedIQ LLC. EmbedIQ builds with AI for a living, so we have a stake in how it goes. That is why the bar here is proof: every story links the source behind its number, and a company announcing its own product is never the story. Spot a number we got wrong? Reply, and the correction runs at the top of the next issue.
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