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Mayo Clinic AI Can Spot Pancreatic Cancer Three Years Before Doctors Can

Pancreatic cancer kills with brutal efficiency, largely because it is almost never found early enough to treat. A new AI tool from the Mayo Clinic may be about to change that.

Researchers at Mayo’s Rochester campus, in collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center, have validated an AI model called REDMOD — the Radiomics-based Early Detection Model — that can identify pancreatic cancer on routine abdominal CT scans up to three years before a clinical diagnosis. The study was published in the journal Gut in April 2026.

REDMOD identified 73 percent of prediagnostic cancers at a median of about 16 months before diagnosis — nearly double the detection rate of specialists reviewing the same scans without AI assistance. In scans obtained more than two years before diagnosis, the AI identified nearly three times as many early cancers that would otherwise go undetected. Twitchy

The model is designed to analyze CT scans already obtained for other reasons — particularly in high-risk patients such as those with new-onset diabetes — and flag elevated risk before any visible mass appears. It runs automatically without time-intensive manual preparation and was validated across CT scans from multiple institutions, imaging systems, and protocols. RedState

The AI’s ability to correctly identify patients who did not have cancer was also strong, correctly ruling out the disease in 88 percent of cases. When patients had repeat scans, the AI’s risk score was highly consistent — agreeing with itself 90 to 92 percent of the time. Yahoo!

“The greatest barrier to saving lives from pancreatic cancer has been our inability to see the disease when it is still curable,” said senior author Ajit Goenka, a Mayo Clinic radiologist. “This AI can now identify the signature of cancer from a normal-appearing pancreas and it can do so reliably over time and across diverse clinical settings.” Fox News

Pancreatic cancer is projected to become the second-leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States by 2030. Researchers are now advancing REDMOD into clinical testing through a prospective study called AI-PACED, which evaluates how clinicians can integrate AI-guided detection into care for patients at elevated risk. Twitchy

For the roughly 60,000 Americans diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year, most of them too late for surgery, this research represents something rare in oncology: genuine reason for hope.

Sources: Mayo Clinic News Network | FOX 9 Minneapolis | Inside Precision Medicine | The National