Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Oncology: From Productivity Enhancement to Creative Discovery

Modern clinical oncology faces an unprecedented data complexity that exceeds human analytical capacity, making artificial intelligence (AI) integration essential rather than optional. This review examines the dual impact of AI on productivity enhancement and creative discovery in cancer care. We trace the evolution from traditional machine learning to deep learning and transformer-based foundation models, analyzing their clinical applications. AI enhances productivity by automating diagnostic tasks, streamlining documentation, and accelerating research workflows across imaging modalities and clinical data processing. More importantly, AI enables creative discovery by integrating multimodal data to identify computational biomarkers, performing unsupervised phenotyping to reveal hidden patient subgroups, and accelerating drug development. Finally, we introduce the FUTURE-AI framework, outlining the essential requirements for translating AI models into clinical practice. This ensures the responsible deployment of AI, which augments rather than replaces clinical judgment, while maintaining patient-centered care.