A new computer program will “predict” who will develop lung cancer in the next decade, so life-saving interventions can be carried out sooner

A computer program has been developed that can help identify people who are at risk of developing lung cancer in the next ten years.

Called CanPredict, it will be released in the near future and would mean high-risk patients could be screened earlier, potentially saving lives.

Developed by researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Nottingham, it uses a wide range of measures – from smoking status and age to BMI and socioeconomic status – to calculate disease risk.

“We need a way to target those most at risk,” said Fergus Gleeson, a professor of radiology at the University of Oxford who worked on the new tool.

Lung cancer is the second most common type of cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. In the early stages, there are usually no obvious signs or symptoms and it can go unnoticed for some time.

Developed by researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Nottingham, it uses a wide range of measures – from smoking status and age to BMI and socioeconomic status – to calculate disease risk

About half of patients are diagnosed late, when the disease has spread and is more difficult to treat. Screening aimed at detecting the disease early has been shown to improve survival rates.

Screening is done using computed tomography (CT) scans, but it is expensive and requires staff and time, which limits the number of people who can be screened.

Currently, doctors select people for screening through a survey that asks patients of a certain age about their smoking status and family history of the disease. It is hoped that CanPredict can provide a much more accurate way of selecting those proposed for screening.

High-risk patients are referred for extensive screening to hopefully catch the disease when it becomes much easier to treat

The researchers used data from 2.54 million anonymized medical records to see which people were predicted to have the highest risk of developing lung cancer. They then investigated which of the patients developed the disease. CanPredict correctly identified more people developing lung cancer than current methods.

Dr Weiqi Liao, lead author of the study from Oxford University, said: “It works by examining existing patient records so that they can be automatically managed by GPs.”

Julia Hippisley-Cox, professor of clinical epidemiology and general medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “We hope this tool will help better identify patients for screening and detect lung cancer earlier, when treatments are more likely to help.”