Understanding the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Gastrointestinal Cancer Care

At the 2026 ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, Dr. William A. Hall sat down with CURE to discuss the impact of technologies like artificial intelligence on gastrointestinal cancer care.

“You can see in your own experience that some of these AI tools can summarize data; they can give you information. They can [help along] tasks that typically take a long time go a lot faster, and it is, to a certain extent, going to be similar for AI-based oncologic biomarkers,” he explained in the interview.

Hall is a professor and chair of Radiation Oncology, medical director of Froedtert Radiation Oncology, and the Bob Uecker Endowed Chair in the Department of Surgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Transcript

How do oncologists address the risk of overtreatment, and what role do emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and biomarkers play in guiding decisions in cancer care?

Overtreatment is something that we really focus on a lot in the cancer space. We do not want patients to be overtreated. It is a huge priority, and it is a delicate balance that we walk as oncologists, where we really want to cure them, and that is a huge priority, achieving a longstanding, durable cure, but we want to do that with just enough treatment that gets them that cure, such that they are not receiving one single bit of extra treatment or overtreatment.

To do that optimally, we are really going to need to rely on very sophisticated biomarkers going forward into the future. We have been talking about this for many, many years as oncologists; the concept that precision biomarkers must be guiding our therapies going forward is not new. But what I think is very new and very exciting is the ability to both analyze, collect and deploy biomarkers at a faster rate than we have ever seen before, and much of that is really enabled by some of these really sophisticated computational technologies that artificial intelligence has really brought forward.

Many patients are probably familiar with some common artificial intelligence-type day-to-day tools that they may even be using in their lives, things like Siri on the iPhone, ChatGPT, Gemini or other commonly used AI tools. You can see in your own experience that some of these tools can summarize data; they can give you information. They can [help along] tasks that typically take a long time go a lot faster, and it is, to a certain extent, going to be similar for AI-based oncologic biomarkers.

Now we have a much higher standard to set, and we have a much higher bar that we need to meet as oncologists to make sure that these tools are reliable, safe, and, most importantly, are directing us in the right direction for patient care. Broadly speaking, they are going to enable us to further refine the treatment that patients are getting to make sure that we don't overtreat and that we don't recommend more treatment than is necessary, while simultaneously developing and achieving that cure that we all really want for the patient.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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