AI rated “Expert Level” For Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Research have stated that a computer programme could scan and diagnose breast cancer as good as experts in the field. Artificial intelligence has omitted accurate results upon research.

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in women, with more than two million new diagnoses last year alone.

Regular screening is vital in detecting the earliest signs of the disease in patients who show no obvious symptoms.

In Britain, women over 50 are advised to get a mammogram every three years, the results of which are analysed by two independent experts.

But interpreting the scans can leave room for error, and a small percentage of all mammograms either return a false positive — misdiagnosing a healthy patient as having cancer — or false negative — missing the disease as it spreads.

Now researchers at Google Health have trained an artificial intelligence (AI) model to detect cancer in breast scans from thousands of women in Britain and the United States.

The images had already been reviewed by doctors in real life but unlike in a clinical setting, the machine had no patient history to inform its diagnoses.

The team found that their AI model could predict breast cancer from the scans with a similar accuracy level to expert radiographers.

Further, the AI showed a reduction in the proportion of cases where cancer was incorrectly identified — 5.7 percent in the US and 1.2 percent in Britain, respectively.

It also reduced the percentage of missed diagnoses by 9.4 percent among US patients and by 2.7 percent in Britain