Artificial intelligence can spot breast cancer better than doctors: Google

Artificial intelligence can spot breast cancer more accurately than doctors, according to a study by Google Health.

The technology’s reading of mammograms reduced both false positives, where healthy patients are mistakenly diagnosed with the disease, and false negatives, where the cancer is missed, the Alphabet unit said in a blog post. The system reduced false positives by 5.7 per cent in the US, according to the data from more than 28,000 mammograms performed there and in the UK.

Artificial intelligence is particularly good at reading scans, often outperforming experts. Last year, Google published research that showed how the technology could be used to tell whether breast cancer had spread to surrounding lymph nodes, helping pathologists make more accurate diagnoses.

Google is also training artificial intelligence to help determine whether a patient is likely to live or die, mining thousands of data points to help make predictions about outcomes. Still, the company found it has to tread carefully when using patient data. In 2017, British regulators said Alphabet’s artificial intelligence unit, DeepMind, violated UK data-protection law when it tested an app that analysed public medical records without telling patients.

The initial findings for the breast cancer study were published in the journal Nature. The research was done in partnership with DeepMind as well as Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, Northwestern University and Royal Surrey County Hospital.