AI Assists Doctors in Detecting Breast Cancer in World's Largest Trial

Doctors are able to detect more breast cancer patients with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it has been revealed in the world's largest trial. Leading Swedish researchers have suggested that the results of this study indicate that countries should now begin programs utilizing AI's capabilities in scanning.

There is already a shortage of staff in the field of radiology. The use of AI in cancer detection is hoped to reduce the workload on radiologists.

Scientists were testing the potential of AI to read medical scans long before the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. The results of this study have been published in the medical journal The Lancet. 

The new study is reported to be the first fully randomized controlled trial of its kind, which is considered the most reliable method of research. Over 100,000 Swedish women who underwent routine breast cancer scans between 2021 and 2022 were included in this trial.

Women in the study were divided into two groups. In the first group, scans were reviewed by a radiologist with the assistance of an AI system. The second group used the traditional European method, where two radiologists reviewed the scans together. 

The results of the study were surprising. More than 95 patients with breast cancer were found in the scan analysis assisted by AI.

In the next two years, the rate of cancer found during routine checks in women in the AI-assisted group was 12 percent lower. These cases are referred to as 'interval cancer' in patients, which can be even more dangerous. This improvement was seen across women of all ages and with different breast densities. However, the rate of 'false positivity' remained almost the same in both groups.

Professor Kristina Lang of Lund University in Sweden, the senior author of the study, stated that the widespread adoption of AI-assisted mammography could ease the work of radiologists and detect cancer at an early stage. However, she also emphasized the need for caution and continuous monitoring. Jean-Philippe Masson, head of the French Association of Radiologists, said that the experience of doctors is also necessary alongside the use of AI. Sometimes AI mistakenly identifies changes that are not cancer as cancer.

Professor Stephen Duffy of Queen Mary University of London said that this study showed that AI-assisted cancer screening is safe. However, he noted that the reduction in interval cancer is still not definitive and requires further follow-up. Preliminary results from some trials in 2023 also showed that AI reduced the scan time for radiologists by almost half.

The AI model used in this trial, Transpara, was trained on over 200,000 cancer scans obtained from 10 countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 2.3 million women worldwide were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022. Approximately 670,000 women died from this disease.