Given very promising results from an international team of
medical researchers, including Google Health, could AI be soon replacing
doctors when it comes to diagnosing breast cancer?
By: Ringo Bones
Latest results of a medical research published in the journal
Nature has shown that artificial intelligence is more accurate than doctors in
diagnosing breast cancer from mammograms. The international medical research
team, including researchers from Google Health and Imperial College London,
designed and trained a computer model to analyze X-ray images from nearly
29,000 women. The algorithm outperformed six radiologists in reading
mammograms. AI was still as good as two doctors working together and unlike
humans, AI is tireless and experts say it could improve detection.
The newfangled AI mammogram was tested against the current
system in the UK’s NHS that uses two radiologists to analyze each woman’s
X-rays. In rare cases when the two radiologists disagree, a third doctor
assesses the images. In the research study, an AI model was given anonymized images,
so that the women could not be identified. Unlike the human experts, who had
access to the patient’s medical history, the AI had only the mammograms to go
on. The results showed that the AI model was as good as the NHS’s current
double-reading system of two doctors. And it was superior at spotting cancer
than a single doctor.
Compared to one radiologist, there was a reduction of
1.2-percent in false positives, when a mammogram is incorrectly diagnosed as
abnormal. There was also a reduction of 2.7-percent in false negatives, where a
cancer is missed. Dominic King from Google Health said “Our team is really
proud of these research findings, which suggest that we are on our way to
developing a tool that can help clinicians spot breast cancer with greater
accuracy”. Could AI based cancer diagnosis soon become a regular vital medical
routine?
