Can Artificial Intelligence Help See Cancer in New Ways?

Two identical black and white pictures of murky shapes sit side-by-side on a computer screen. On the left side, Ismail Baris Turkbey, MD, a radiologist with 15 years of experience, has outlined an area where the fuzzy shapes represent what he believes is a creeping, growing prostate cancer. On the other side of the screen, an artificial intelligence (AI) computer program has done the same--and the results are nearly identical. The black and white image is an MRI scan from someone with prostate cancer, and the AI program has analyzed thousands of them. "The [AI] model finds the prostate and outlines cancer-suspicious areas without any human supervision," Turkbey explains.