The Application of AI in Oncology Research in Türkiye: Impact and Future Directions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning and deep learning have seen increasing application in medical diagnosis. The field of oncology has seen the application of AI in cancer detection and diagnosis, treatment selection and survival prediction for patients. This study evaluates recent research in the application of AI in oncology and its potential impact on the Turkish health and medical sectors through a review-based study. We identified 41 research studies from 2020 to 2024 applying AI in oncology utilizing datasets curated from Turkish medical data. Our analysis showed that all studies were retrospective, with the majority being diagnosis studies. Patient datasets were unicentric, relatively small and not publicly available. Thus, most of the reported results cannot be generalized until the models are validated in larger, more diverse studies. The majority of studies concentrated on model accuracy, with limited evidence of model integration in clinical settings or within the health industry. Our findings indicate that more work is required in order to develop more advanced approaches for human-AI collaboration, i.e., clinician–in-the-loop or patient-in-the-loop approaches. An important step toward achieving this is to create and maintain a national dataset for AI in oncology research in Türkiye. Although this study is specific to Türkiye, we anticipate that its findings may be relevant to countries with similar research environments.