OncovigIA: Artificial Intelligence for Early Lung Cancer Detection and Referral in a Chilean Public Hospital

Lung cancer is a leading cause of death in Chile, where late-stage diagnoses and high mortality rates prevail. Here, we describe the development of OncovigIA, a novel digital tool powered by natural language processing that enhances the identification of potential lung cancer cases by surveilling computed tomography (CT) reports in a large public Hospital in Santiago, Chile.

We combined natural language processing and large language models with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and approaches to treat unbalanced data sets and determine the best solution to implement in OncovigIA. Focusing on key sections of the reports and using various machine learning models, including a balanced Random Forest, the tool achieved high performance with 0.90 accuracy and 0.84 F1-score on the test set.

When applied to 13,326 CT chest reports from 2022, it successfully identified 377 CTs of patients with suspected lung cancer previously undetected and not managed by the multidisciplinary local lung cancer team.

This study underscores the potential of artificial intelligence in early cancer detection and highlights the importance of its integration into local health care ecosystems. By promptly increasing the number of patients referred for specialized management, the tool OncovigIA offers a promising path toward improving lung cancer survival rates in Chile and beyond. Moreover, this article provides avenues for its broader implementation, extending it to other cancer types and/or health care-related texts for continuous surveillance, aiming at the early referral and treatment of cancer in low-resource settings.