Improving Breast Cancer Treatment using AI

Potentially increasing the accuracy of breast screening interpretation.

Scientists at the Imperial College London working on a new project to investigate how Artificial Intelligence (AI) could enhance breast cancer diagnosis. They believe that it could possibly prompt more exact identification of growths.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. Almost 1.6 million women around the world diagnosed every year. And as an estimate suggests, on average 500,000 women died each year globally.

Well, diagnosis at earlier stage lead to better outcomes but the precise detection of it remains more challenging. Generally, Mammograms technique is used, but still, it is not perfect.

Improving Breast Cancer Treatment using AI
Machines will learn to review mammograms (pictured)

Scientists now explore whether cutting-edge machine learning could help them in detecting and diagnosing breast cancers more effectively than current techniques allow. As machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence, it has the potential to increase the accuracy of breast screening interpretation, improving the ability to detect breast cancers on mammograms.

As part of this project, machine learning technology from DeepMind Health and the AI health research team at Google will be applied to historic ‘de-identified’ mammograms from around 7,500 women provided by the Cancer Research UK-funded OPTIMAM database at the Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Through this examination, the group would like to investigate whether it is conceivable to prepare the computer algorithms to break down these pictures, to spot indications of harmful tissue and notify radiologists more precisely than current methods permit.

Professor Ara Darzi, Director of the Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, said, “This partnership marks an exciting exploration of the potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare.”

“Ultimately, we want this kind of technology to benefit patients and it may be a number of years until this kind of approach is used, but if these initial trials prove successful, AI could make screening services for cancer far more efficient and improve outcomes.”

Dr Iain Foulkes, Cancer Research UK’s Executive Director of Research and Innovation, said, “Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence could enable us to address some of the biggest challenges in breast cancer research, including improving the accuracy of detection.”

“Too many cancers are detected at a late stage when they are more difficult to treat. This is why Cancer Research UK is building capacity, forging new partnerships, and supporting a community for early detection research so that more people might survive their disease.”

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