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AI shows promise for breast cancer screening

Could artificial intelligence improve the accuracy of screening for breast cancer? A comparison of the diagnostic performance of expert physicians and computers suggests so, but the clinical implications are as yet uncertain.
  1. Etta D. Pisano

    1. Etta D. Pisano is at the American College of Radiology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103, USA, and at Beth Israel Lahey Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.

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Screening is used to detect breast cancer early in women who have no obvious signs of the disease. This image-analysis task is challenging because cancer is often hidden or masked in mammograms by overlapping ‘dense’ breast tissue. The problem has stimulated efforts to develop computer-based artificial-intelligence (AI) systems to improve diagnostic performance. Writing in Nature, McKinney et al.1 report the development of an AI system that outperforms expert radiologists in accurately interpreting mammograms from screening programmes. The work is part of a wave of studies investigating the use of AI in a range of medical-imaging contexts2.

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Nature 577, 35-36 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03822-8

References

  1. McKinney, S. M. et al. Nature 577, 89–94 (2020).

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  2. Neri, E. et al. Insights Imaging 10, 44 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Lehman, C. D. et al. JAMA Intern. Med. 175, 1828–1837 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Kohli, A. & Jha, S. J. Am. Coll. Radiol. 15, 535–537 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

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