To have surgery or not to have surgery? That is the big question for hundreds of thousands of Americans diagnosed each year with a pancreatic cyst.
The dilemma? While cysts are very common, most will not actually lead to cancer. But for doctors, determining which will from which won’t is often a shot in the dark. So many patients undergo a highly invasive cyst-removal operation out of an abundance of caution, often unnecessarily.
Enter “CompCyst.” New research suggests that this experimental, artificial intelligence-driven test could help slice the number of such unwarranted surgeries nearly in half.
“In those few patients who would go on to develop a cancer from their cyst, the benefit of these big operations in preventing cancer strongly outweigh the risks of surgery,” noted study author Dr. Christopher Wolfgang, from the
