Study finds Google system could improve breast cancer detection

CHICAGO — A Google artificial intelligence system proved as good as expert radiologists at detecting which women had breast cancer based on screening mammograms and showed promise at reducing errors, researchers in the United States and Britain reported.

The study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, is the latest to show that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve the accuracy of screening for breast cancer, which affects one in eight women globally.

Radiologists miss about 20 percent of breast cancers in mammograms, the American Cancer Society says, and half of all women who get the screenings over a 10-year period have a false positive result.

The findings of the study, developed with Alphabet Inc's DeepMind AI unit, which merged with Google Health in September, represent a major advance in the potential for the early detection of breast cancer, Mozziyar Etemadi, one of its co-authors from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said.

The team, which included researchers at Imperial College London and Britain's National Health Service, trained the system to identify breast cancers on tens of thousands of mammograms.

They then compared the system's performance with the actual results from a set of 25,856 mammograms in the United Kingdom and 3,097 from the United States.

The study showed the AI system could identify cancers with a similar degree of accuracy to expert radiologists, while reducing the number of false positive results by 5.7 percent in the US-based group and by 1.2 percent in the British-based group. 

It also cut the number of false negatives, where tests are wrongly classified as normal, by 9.4 percent in the US group, and by 2.7 percent in the British group.

These differences reflect the ways in which mammograms are read. In the United States, only one radiologist reads the results and the tests are done every one to 2 years. In Britain, the tests are done every 3 years, and each is read by 2 radiologists. When they disagree, a third is consulted.

'SUBTLE CUES'

In a separate test, the group pitted the AI system against 6 radiologists and found it outperformed them at accurately detecting breast cancers.

Connie Lehman, chief of the breast imaging department at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital, said the results are in line with findings from several groups using AI to improve cancer detection in mammograms, including her own work.

The notion of using computers to improve cancer diagnostics is decades old, and computer-aided detection (CAD) systems are commonplace in mammography clinics, yet CAD programs have not improved performance in clinical practice.

The issue, Lehman said, is that current CAD programs were trained to identify things human radiologists can see, whereas with AI, computers learn to spot cancers based on the actual results of thousands of mammograms.

This has the potential to "exceed human capacity to identify subtle cues that the human eye and brain aren't able to perceive," Lehman added.

Although computers have not been "super helpful" so far, "what we've shown at least in tens of thousands of mammograms is the tool can actually make a very well-informed decision," Etemadi said.

The study has some limitations. Most of the tests were done using the same type of imaging equipment, and the US group contained a lot of patients with confirmed breast cancers.

Crucially, the team has yet to show the tool improves patient care, said Dr Lisa Watanabe, chief medical officer of CureMetrix, whose AI mammogram program won US approval last year.

"AI software is only helpful if it actually moves the dial for the radiologist," she said.

Etemadi agreed that those studies are needed, as is regulatory approval, a process that could take several years. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Hospital radiologists can help detect domestic violence, researchers say

NEW YORK - Radiologists, who typically interact little with patients, can play a key role in identifying victims of abuse by spotting patterns of injuries that point to domestic violence, researchers said on Tuesday.

Abuse victims, most often women, have more face, skull and arm fractures than other patients, combined with high rates of asthma, chronic pain and suicide attempts, a team at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston reported.

The signs of abuse can be detected by radiologists, who specialize in interpreting images such as X-rays, given that such victims undergo four times more emergency-related imaging exams than other patients, the researchers said.

The abuse can be physical, sexual and psychological, they said.

"There's a wealth of information that's available to us as radiologists," said Dr. Elizabeth George, chief resident in the department of radiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a lead researcher of the report.

"There might be indications on the prior imaging, and if you see a pattern, that could alert you to something else going on in this case, such as violence."

The World Health Organization reports that one in three women experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime.

The Violence Policy Center, a research and advocacy group focused on gun violence, reported that more than half the women murdered in the United States last year were killed by current or former romantic partners.

Signs of abuse can be easily missed in a busy hospital emergency department, George said.

The researchers also said hospital records may not identify or report certain injuries as abuse.

"Survivors need someone there who knows what's happening," said Ruth Glenn, head of the Colorado-based National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

"That alone can plant the seed to find safety. The medical field is perfectly set up to do this."

Turning the findings into action to help victims will require a coordinated effort among radiologists, social workers, emergency room doctors and others, George told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

More than 96 percent of U.S. victims of violence at the hands of an intimate partner are women, and the highest rates occur among black and Hispanic women, according to the report, published in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America.

(Reporting by Kate Ryan; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights, and climate chenge. Visit www.trust.org)

source: news.abs-cbn.com