An AI technology is effective at planning the delivery of life-saving radiotherapy for cervical cancer and prostate cancer.
18 May 2026
An AI technology is effective at planning the delivery of life-saving radiotherapy for cervical cancer and prostate cancer, according to results from a large international trial led by researchers at UCL and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
For cervical cancer, 94% of deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries (350,000 women died in 2022). Radiotherapy is the main curative treatment, but currently only 10% of people who need radiotherapy in low-income countries receive it (the figure is 40% in middle-income nations), with a shortage of skilled professionals one of the major barriers.
The researchers say that by producing high-quality radiotherapy plans quickly, the AI technology saves time and cost, enabling more people to be treated and cured, by bridging the workforce gap.
The trial, called ARCHERY, was conducted at hospitals in India, South Africa, Jordan and Malaysia, and involved more than 1,000 cancer patients with three main cancers, cervix, prostate and head and neck. It assessed whether the AI technology can achieve international best-practice radiotherapy planning, usually undertaken by oncologists and physicists, to enable its use across all resource settings, including countries such as the UK.
Planning radiotherapy involves several complex steps requiring often many hours of work from an oncologist (to outline tumours on a CT scan as well as areas at risk of tumour spread, and areas of healthy tissue at risk of radiation damage) and from a physicist (to identify the best position, size and shape of the radiation beam). The AI-based software automatically does this by identifying target structures and determining optimal radiation beam configurations - tasks that traditionally take days or weeks.
The new results, presented at the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO) congress in Stockholm, found that the AI technology could plan radiotherapy to a high standard in more than 95% of cervical cancer cases.
For prostate cancer, the technology planned radiotherapy to a high standard in 85% of cases, which would still be considered suitable for routine use in the clinical setting. The results for head and neck cancer will be available later this year.
The AI technology, known as the Radiotherapy Planning Assistant, was developed by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre led by Professor Laurence Court and team.
The ARCHERY trial is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US, the Rising Tide Foundation, and the UK's Medical Research Council. It was designed and run by the UCL Innovative Clinical Trials Unit.
Partners of the trial include Cape Town University, Stellenbosch University, Tata Medical Centre, Kolkata, Tata Memorial Hospital Mumbai, the University of Malaya Medical Centre, King Hussein Cancer Center, Ghent University, and the UK Radiotherapy Trials Quality Assurance Group (RTTQA).
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