NEW JERSEY — Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center’s Pancreatic Cyst Surveillance Program, a new health research program, is on a mission to find clues in time to save lives.
It’s a cutting-edge combination of high-tech medical science and good old-fashioned medical sleuthing, said CBS2’s John Elliott, who is in the program.
“We were absolutely thrilled to be the first in the region and one of the first in the country to onboard artificial intelligence for pancreatic cyst patients,” said Dr. Russell C. Langan.
About 15 percent of us have pancreatic cysts, little pockets filled with fluid. The vast majority are found incidentally when looking for something else.
“We know the cyst is the precursor lesion, so it’s the perfect model to try to understand how do these cancers develop,” said Dr. Brett Ecker.
Elliott has had kidney stones, which means getting occasional CT scans of the kidneys. Doctors found a cyst on his pancreas during one of those scans.
“The risk of cancer for a mucinous cyst can be as low as two percent over a patient’s lifetime or as high as 65 percent over a patient’s lifetime,” said Langan. “The artificial intelligence software that we are using within our program identifies patients automatically if they have an abnormality in their pancreas.”
“Some of our research here is trying to identify new biomarkers that would help us to understand which are the high-risk lesions that we should be more aggressive with,” said Ecker.
“Our main focus here in the pancreatic cyst population is to mitigate and lower the risk of someone developing a pancreatic cancer, because once the cancer develops that patient is rarely cured of their disease,” Langan added.
The staff at Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center is working with the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and software developer Eon Health.
In addition to a cyst on his pancreas, Elliott said doctors found something else inside his pancreas. He is scheduled for an endoscopic ultrasound later in January.
