Seoul St. Mary's Hospital bags $407K grant to build AI prognosis model for liver cancer

Liver cancer ranks second in cancer mortality in the country.

Catholic University of Korea Seoul St. Mary's Hospital will receive $407,373 (KRW600m) to develop a multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict the prognosis of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

The hospital said the approach will analyse high-resolution clinical information of individual patients, which was difficult to capture with existing big data approaches.

According to a 2024 South Korean statistic, liver cancer ranks second in cancer mortality in the country, following lung cancer.

Although immunotherapy has recently been introduced as standard treatment for advanced liver cancer, the objective response rate (ORR) remains at only about 30%.

Professor Han Ji-won of the Department of Gastroenterology, who leads the research, said his team aims to complete it in five years.

They also aim to publish multiple SCI(E) level papers, file for domestic and international patents, and extend research applications to other fields of gastrointestinal cancer.