Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Into Cancer Clinical Trials

The practice of oncology requires analyzing and synthesizing abundant data. From the patient's workup to determine eligibility to the therapies received to the post-treatment surveillance, practitioners must constantly juggle, evaluate, and weigh decision-making based on their best understanding of information at hand. These complex, multifactorial decisions have a tremendous opportunity to benefit from data-driven machine learning (ML) methods to drive opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI). Within the past 5 years, we have seen AI move from simply a promising opportunity to being used in prospective trials. Here, we review recent efforts of AI in clinical trials that have moved the needle towards improved prediction of actionable outcomes, such as predicting acute care visits, short term mortality, and pathologic extranodal extension. We then pause and reflect on how these AI models ask a different question than traditional statistics models that readers may be more familiar with; how then should readers conceptualize and interpret AI models that they are not as familiar with. We end with what we believe are promising future opportunities for AI in oncology, with an eye towards allowing the data to inform us through unsupervised learning and generative models, rather than asking AI to perform specific functions.