AI achieves near-human efficiency in detecting cancer - CyberPsychology

A research team from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) method, aimed at training computers to interpret pathology images. The team trained the computer to distinguish between cancerous tumor regions and normal regions based on a deep multi-layer convolutional network. In an objective evaluation in which researchers were given slides of lymph node cells and asked to determine whether or not they contained cancer, the team's automated diagnostic method proved accurate approximately 92 per cent of the time. One of the researchers, Aditya Khosla, said, "This nearly matched the success rate of a human pathologist, whose results were 96 percent accurate." "In our approach, we started with hundreds of training slides for which a pathologist has labeled regions of cancer and regions of normal cells," said Dayong Wang.