AI improves diagnosis, reduces false positives from mammo images

Radiologists getting an assist from artificial intelligence can detect more breast cancer--with a reduced rate of false positive incidents--from mammography images. A new study, published late last week in the Lancet Digital Health online journal, contends that AI can boost the accuracy of diagnosis by radiologists, compared with the results they achieve by just examining images from mammography exams. The study was conducted by Korean academic hospitals and Lunit, a Seoul-based medical AI company working in radiology and oncology. It draws on large-scale data of more than 170,000 mammogram examinations from five healthcare organizations in South Korea, the U.S. and the U.K. The set of data includes more than 36,000 cases found positive for cancer and verified by biopsies. That data trained the AI models, and the sensitivity of the model was compared with how radiologists perform without any technological assistance with diagnosis.