AI Is Now As Good At Detecting Breast Cancer As Humans

The International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging set the challenge between October 2015 to April 2016 to encourage research into identifying breast cancer by computers rather than by pathologists. Since the nineteenth century, the primary tool used to identify cells has always been the microscope but the report, by the Harvard team, identified many problems with this system. These included a lack of standardization across the board, diagnosis errors and the time it takes for pathologists to manually load millions of slides each year. Utilisting deep learning, and feeding the machine hundreds of slides showing both cancerous and non-cancerous lymph nodes, scientists were able to train AI to pick out hazardous cells. Using this technique they were able to make the AI accurate in 92 per cent of diagnosis and decrease the human rate of error by 85 per cent.