In a preliminary test, a model trained only on data from UK women still performed better than experts on US patients.
The news: DeepMind and Google Health have developed a new AI system to help doctors detect breast cancer early. The researchers trained an algorithm on mammogram images from female patients in the US and UK, and it performed better than human radiologists. The results were published in Nature on Wednesday.
A tragedy of errors: Breast cancer is the most common cancer for women globally, and their second leading cause of death. Though early detection and treatment can improve a patient’s prognosis, screening tests have high rates of error. About 1 in 5 screenings fail to find breast cancer even when it’s present, also known as a false negative; 50% of women who receive annual mammograms also get at least one false alarm over a 10-year period, known as a false positive.
The results: In tests, the AI system decreased both types of error. For US patients, it reduced false negatives and positives by 9.4% and 5.7%, respectively; for UK patients it reduced them by 2.7% and 1.2%. In a separate experiment, the researchers tested the system’s ability to generalize: they trained the model using only mammograms from UK patients, and then evaluated its performance on US patients. The system still outperformed human radiologists, reducing false negatives and positives by 8.1% and 3.5%.
Human and machine: Ultimately, both studies conclude that such AI breast cancer screenings should be used in tandem with human radiologists. The combination achieves the most accurate diagnostic results but still reduces the workload on human radiologists, which would help free up their time to focus more on patient care.
AIWS Innovation Network (AIWS-IN), with the domain name AIWS.world, connects distinguished professors, scholars, innovators from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Oxford, Cambridge, and more, as well as companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, and others, to provide services for governments, companies, and organizations. The AIWS-IN was launched on December 12, 2019 at Harvard University, and will begin to operate from January 1, 2020.
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