A COMPUTER programme which could help save the lives of breast cancer patients has been developed in the region.

Dreamt up by two scientists at Newcastle University, the programme can identify which patients are more at risk from the disease spreading and coming back.

The scientists believe the system could be used to concentrate treatment on women who have the poorest outlook.

In a preliminary study involving 100 women the new system correctly predicted, in almost nine out of ten cases, whether the disease would spread and whether the women would survive for five years without cancer coming back.

Dr Gajanan Sherbet and Dr Raouf Naguib, who developed the system at Newcastle University, said they were hopeful it could one day save lives by helping specialists decide at an early stage which patients should have intensive treatment.

The research, which was funded by the charity Cancer Research UK is published in New Scientist magazine.

The two scientists assembled computer circuits modelled on the nerves and neurones of the brain.

Once assembled, the system was "trained" to analyse images of cells from tissue samples taken from breast cancer patients, for patterns of abnormality which could be used to predict the outcome of the disease.

Dr Sherbet said: "The results are promising, but they would need to be confirmed by full-scale trials before the technique could be introduced into hospitals."

Dr Sherbet is also a professor at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in California, US, but conducted the research at Newcastle with Dr Naguib, professor of biomedical computing at Coventry University.

Dr Stephen Duffy, of Cancer Research UK, said: "This is an interesting line of research and the results look promising. A few further lines of inquiry should be pursued before we can say whether this has serious potential to add to what is currently available in staging, prognosis and clinical decisions in breast cancer. "

Mary Lee, 59, from Stokesley, North Yorkshire, who has twice fought off breast cancer, said: "This is really amazing. Anything that can speed up treatment of breast cancer has got to be a good thing."