Google AI detects breast cancer better than pathologists - Pharmaphorum

Google has successfully applied deep learning artificial intelligence algorithms to the diagnosis of breast cancer. In a study carried out by researchers taking part in Google's Brain Residency Program – a 12-month educational course in machine and deep learning – an algorithm was trained to detect breast cancer tumours in a dataset of digitised pathology slides provided by Dutch medical institute the Radboud University Medical Center. After'training' the algorithm, researchers were able to achieve a 92% sensitivity in picking out tumour cells from the slides – significantly higher than the 73% achieved by trained pathologists with no time constraint. In addition, the team recreated the accuracy in different datasets taken from other hospitals and scanning machinery. The team did report an average of eight false positive per slide compared to none from trained pathologists.