New research could take some of the guesswork out of reading MRI and CT scans. Prof Alex Wong, Canada research chair in medical imaging systems and a professor of system design engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, has discovered unique biomarkers that could help radiologists better identify prostate and lung tumours on medical images.

“You could treat it as creating a digital fingerprint for characterising tissue,” Prof Wong said, one that can be compared to a patient’s MRI or CT scan. “If this particular fingerprint matches that of, let’s say, a malignant tumour, then a radiologist can look at this and say, ‘Well, these are very similar. Maybe this is something we should look further into’.”

Wong developed his fingerprints by feeding hundreds of pages of medical images into a computer, and then designing a programme that would look for similarities. In this way, he was able to identify the characteristics unique to images of certain tumours.