The study, published Tuesday, does not argue in favour of AI as a replacement for radiologists, but rather for its ability to improve screen-reading speed and accuracy in a safe manner.
Researchers scanned over 80,000 women aged 40 to 80 years old at four screening sites in Sweden between April 2021 and July 2022.The women were assigned to either an intervention group, whose mammograms were read by radiologists with the support of AI, or a control group, where mammograms were read by two radiologists without the use of AI.Cancer was detected at a rate of 6.
“AI-supported mammography screening resulted in a similar cancer detection rate compared with standard double reading, with a substantially lower screen-reading workload, indicating that the use of AI in mammography screening is safe,” the study says.The false positive rate came out at 1.5 per cent for both groups, showing that the additional cancer detections made by AI are not due to an over-sensitivity.
When patients get breast cancer, they typically undergo imaging such as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI to look for cancerous tumors. The Waterloo lab has created “a synthetic correlate diffusion” MRI that is tailored to capture details and properties of cancer in a way that previous MRI systems couldn’t.