AI Research

Artificial intelligence set to transform mental health care for breast cancer patients

Published

1 week ago

August 21, 2025

From virtual counselors that can hear depression creeping into a person’s voice to smart watches that can detect stress, artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize mental health care for patients with breast cancer.

In a new paper, UVA Cancer Center’s J. Kim Penberthy, PhD, and colleagues detail the many ways artificial intelligence could help ensure patients receive the support they need. AI, they say, can identify patients at risk for mental-health struggles, get them treatment earlier, provide continuous psychological monitoring and even perform personalized interventions tailored to the individual.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. AI, the researchers say, can overcome some of the biggest barriers patients face to getting mental-health support by expanding options beyond clinic walls and delivering care exactly where and when it’s needed – even to rural areas where patients lack local mental-health treatment options.

Soon, doctors may combine multiple AI technologies to provide patients a “holistic, interactive treatment experience” that ensures the mental-health support is every bit as good as the care for the cancer itself, the UVA researchers write.

“AI can help us notice when a patient is struggling and get them the right support faster,” said Penberthy, a clinical psychologist at UVA Health and UVA Cancer Center. “This technology is moving quickly, and it’s exciting to see how soon it could make a real difference in people’s lives.“

Breast cancer and mental health

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, with 2.3 million new diagnoses each year. Up to half of those patients will go on to experience anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While there have been great advances in how we treat breast cancer, mental-health support for these patients has lagged behind, the UVA researchers note.

“Mental health care is a lifeline for women with breast cancer,” Penberthy said. “Up to half experience anxiety or depression, and without support, treatment and quality of life can suffer. AI can help spot distress early and connect women to the care they need.“

The co-authors envision a future – a near future – where AI plays a vast and crucial role in supporting patients’ mental health. The technology, they say, should not replace clinicians and care providers, but instead can extend providers’ reach and presence. By monitoring patients in real time, for example, AI could alert doctors that a patient may be struggling or slipping into depression.

Similarly, AI-powered chatbots and telepsychiatry platforms offer “scalable, cost-effective solutions” to increase access to psychological care, the researchers write. These advanced AI chatbots go far beyond the simple conversations often associated with their ilk. Instead of just responding to straightforward questions, the electronic entities can provide on-demand emotional support, suggest coping mechanisms, detail relaxation techniques and offer continuous psychological support even when therapists are unavailable.

AI, the researchers write, has tremendous potential to improve “accessibility, personalization, efficiency and cost-effectiveness“ of mental health care for patients with breast cancer. But they caution that the technology also brings challenges and ethical considerations. For example, AI can be a powerful tool to analyze mental health data, but this requires strict safeguards to protect patient privacy. Similarly, studies have shown that AI can “underperform” for patients from minority or underrepresented backgrounds, potentially contributing to care disparities, the authors write.

Those are the type of things that doctors and researchers will have to keep in mind as they explore the potential of AI, Penberthy and her collaborators say. But they are excited for what the future holds, noting that AI has “immense” potential for improving mental health support for patients with breast cancer.

We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of AI’s potential in health care and the positive impact AI will have in our lives. I’m incredibly optimistic about what the future will bring!”

David Penberthy, MD, MBA, co-author

UVA’s cutting-edge cancer research

Finding new ways to improve patient care is a core mission of both UVA Cancer Center and UVA’s Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology. UVA Cancer Center is one of only 57 cancer centers in the country designated “comprehensive” by the National Cancer Institute in recognition of their exceptional patient care and cutting-edge cancer research.

The Manning Institute, meanwhile, has been launched to accelerate the development of new treatment and cures for the most challenging diseases. This will be complemented by a statewide clinical trials network that expands access to potential new treatments as they are developed and tested.

AI paper published

The Penberthys and their co-author – Jennifer Bires, MSW, LCSW, OSW-C – have published their paper in the scientific journal AI in Precision Oncology.

Source:

University of Virginia Health System

Journal reference:

Kim Penberthy, J., et al. (2025) A Narrative Review of the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Supporting the Mental Health of Patients with Breast Cancer. AI in Precision Oncology. https://doi.org/10.1177/2993091X251361147.

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Tories pledge to get ‘all our oil and gas out of the North Sea’

Published

3 hours ago

August 31, 2025

Helen Catt

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said her party will remove all net zero requirements on oil and gas companies drilling in the North Sea if elected.

Badenoch is to formally announce the plan to focus solely on “maximising extraction” and to get “all our oil and gas out of the North Sea” in a speech in Aberdeen on Tuesday.

Reform UK has said it wants more fossil fuels extracted from the North Sea.

The Labour government has committed to banning new exploration licences. A spokesperson said a “fair and orderly transition” away from oil and gas would “drive growth”.

Exploring new fields would “not take a penny off bills” or improve energy security and would “only accelerate the worsening climate crisis”, the government spokesperson warned.

Badenoch signalled a significant change in Conservative climate policy when she announced earlier this year that reaching net zero would be “impossible” by 2050.

Successive UK governments have pledged to reach the target by 2050 and it was written into law by Theresa May in 2019. It means the UK must cut carbon emissions until it removes as much as it produces, in line with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Now Badenoch has said that requirements to work towards net zero are a burden on oil and gas producers in the North Sea which are damaging the economy and which she would remove.

The Tory leader said a Conservative government would scrap the need to reduce emissions or to work on technologies such as carbon storage.

Badenoch said it was “absurd” the UK was leaving “vital resources untapped” while “neighbours like Norway extracted them from the same sea bed”.

In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak granted 100 new licences to drill in the North Sea which he said at the time was “entirely consistent” with net zero commitments.

Reform UK has said it will abolish the push for net zero if elected.

The current government said it had made the “biggest ever investment in offshore wind and three first of a kind carbon capture and storage clusters”.

Carbon capture and storage facilities aim to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from industrial processes and power stations from being released into the atmosphere.

Most of the CO2 produced is captured, transported and then stored deep underground.

It is seen by the likes of the International Energy Agency and the Climate Change Committee as a key element in meeting targets to cut the greenhouse gases driving dangerous climate change.

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Dogs and drones join forest battle against eight-toothed beetle

Published

3 hours ago

August 31, 2025

Esme Stallard and Justin Rowlatt

Esme Stallard and Justin RowlattClimate and science team

Sean Gallup/Getty Images A close up shot of Ips Typographus, a light brown hairy beetle with three front legs visible one slightly extended out. It is walking along the bark of a logged spruce tree.

It is smaller than your fingernail, but this hairy beetle is one of the biggest single threats to the UK’s forests.

The bark beetle has been the scourge of Europe, killing millions of spruce trees, yet the government thought it could halt its spread to the UK by checking imported wood products at ports.

But this was not their entry route of choice – they were being carried on winds straight over the English Channel.

Now, UK government scientists have been fighting back, with an unusual arsenal including sniffer dogs, drones and nuclear waste models.

They claim the UK has eradicated the beetle from at risk areas in the east and south east. But climate change could make the job even harder in the future.

The spruce bark beetle, or Ips typographus, has been munching its way through the conifer trees of Europe for decades, leaving behind a trail of destruction.

The beetles rear and feed their young under the bark of spruce trees in complex webs of interweaving tunnels called galleries.

When trees are infested with a few thousand beetles they can cope, using resin to flush the beetles out.

But for a stressed tree its natural defences are reduced and the beetles start to multiply.

“Their populations can build to a point where they can overcome the tree defences – there are millions, billions of beetles,” explained Dr Max Blake, head of tree health at the UK government-funded Forestry Research.

“There are so many the tree cannot deal with them, particularly when it is dry, they don’t have the resin pressure to flush the galleries.”

Since the beetle took hold in Norway over a decade ago it has been able to wipe out 100 million cubic metres of spruce, according to Rothamsted Research.

‘Public enemy number one’

As Sitka spruce is the main tree used for timber in the UK, Dr Blake and his colleagues watched developments on continental Europe with some serious concern.

“We have 725,000 hectares of spruce alone, if this beetle was allowed to get hold of that, the destructive potential means a vast amount of that is at risk,” said Andrea Deol at Forestry Research. “We valued it – and it’s a partial valuation at £2.9bn per year in Great Britain.”

There are more than 1,400 pests and diseases on the government’s plant health risk register, but Ips has been labelled “public enemy number one”.

The number of those diseases has been accelerating, according to Nick Phillips at charity The Woodland Trust.

“Predominantly, the reason for that is global trade, we’re importing wood products, trees for planting, which does sometimes bring ‘hitchhikers’ in terms of pests and disease,” he said.

Forestry Research had been working with border control for years to check such products for Ips, but in 2018 made a shocking discovery in a wood in Kent.

“We found a breeding population that had been there for a few years,” explained Ms Deol.

“Later we started to pick up larger volumes of beetles in [our] traps which seemed to suggest they were arriving by other means. All of the research we have done now has indicated they are being blown over from the continent on the wind,” she added.

Daegan Inward/Forestry Research Barren spruce trees stripped of branches and leaves stand in a field, on the ground are some felled trees arranged in groups. The floor is covered in low level shrubland and moss. In the background is a spruce forest set against a cloudy sky — The Ips beetle has left some spruce forests in Denmark and other European countries decimated

The team knew they had to act quickly and has been deploying a mixture of techniques that wouldn’t look out of place in a military operation.

Drones are sent up to survey hundreds of hectares of forest, looking for signs of infestation from the sky – as the beetle takes hold, the upper canopy of the tree cannot be fed nutrients and water, and begins to die off.

But next is the painstaking work of entomologists going on foot to inspect the trees themselves.

“They are looking for a needle in a haystack, sometimes looking for single beetles – to get hold of the pioneer species before they are allowed to establish,” Andrea Deol said.

In a single year her team have inspected 4,500 hectares of spruce on the public estate – just shy of 7,000 football pitches.

Such physically-demanding work is difficult to sustain and the team has been looking for some assistance from the natural and tech world alike.

Tony Jolliffe/BBC A grey drone with four outstretched arms in a diamond formation hovers over a spruce forest. A walking path cuts through the centre of the forest, and splits to the right, at the corner of the junction sit some logs. — Drones are able to survey large areas of forest detecting potentially infested areas for closer inspection

When the pioneer Spruce bark beetles find a suitable host tree they release pheromones – chemical signals to attract fellow beetles and establish a colony.

But it is this strong smell, as well as the smell associated with their insect poo – frass – that makes them ideal to be found by sniffer dogs.

Early trials so far have been successful. The dogs are particularly useful for inspecting large timber stacks which can be difficult to inspect visually.

The team is also deploying cameras on their bug traps, which are now able to scan daily for the beetles and identify them in real time.

“We have [created] our own algorithm to identify the insects. We have taken about 20,000 images of Ips, other beetles and debris, which have been formally identified by entomologists, and fed it into the model,” said Dr Blake.

Some of the traps can be in difficult to access areas and previously had only been checked every week by entomologists working on the ground.

The result of this work means that the UK has been confirmed as the first country to have eradicated Ips Typographus in its controlled areas, deemed to be at risk from infestation, and which covers the south east and east England.

“What we are doing is having a positive impact and it is vital that we continue to maintain that effort, if we let our guard down we know we have got those incursion risks year on year,” said Ms Deol.

Tony Jolliffe/BBC A stack of cut timber logs are to the left of the image in some tall grass. On the right stands a woman in blue jeans, a t-shirt and red gilet guiding a white and brown spaniel dog along the logs. The dog is wearing an orange harness and lead. In the background a white 4x4 truck sits on a gravel path to the right. — Sniffer dogs are piloted to sniff out the spruce bark beetle at a test ground in the Alice Holt forest in Hampshire

And those risks are rising. Europe has seen populations of Ips increase as they take advantage of trees stressed by the changing climate.

Europe is experiencing more extreme rainfall in winter and milder temperatures meaning there is less freezing, leaving the trees in waterlogged conditions.

This coupled with drier summers leaves them stressed and susceptible to falling in stormy weather, and this is when Ips can take hold.

With larger populations in Europe the risk of Ips colonies being carried to the UK goes up.

The team at Forestry Research has been working hard to accurately predict when these incursions may occur.

“We have been doing modelling with colleagues at the University of Cambridge and the Met Office which have adapted a nuclear atmospheric dispersion model to Ips,” explained Dr Blake. “So, [the model] was originally used to look at nuclear fallout and where the winds take it, instead we are using the model to look at how far Ips goes.”

Nick Phillips at The Woodland Trust is strongly supportive of the government’s work but worries about the loss of ancient woodland – the oldest and most biologically-rich areas of forest.

Commercial spruce have long been planted next to such woods, and every time a tree hosting spruce beetle is found, it and neighbouring, sometimes ancient trees, have to be removed.

“We really want the government to maintain as much of the trees as they can, particularly the ones that aren’t affected, and then also when the trees are removed, supporting landowners to take steps to restore what’s there,” he said. “So that they’re given grants, for example, to be able to recover the woodland sites.”

The government has increased funding for woodlands in recent years but this has been focused on planting new trees.

“If we only have funding and support for the first few years of a tree’s life, but not for those woodlands that are 100 or century years old, then we’re not going to be able to deliver nature recovery and capture carbon,” he said.

Additional reporting Miho Tanaka