Google's AI system can grade prostate cancer cells with 70% accuracy

Approximately one in nine men in the U.S. will develop prostate cancer in their lifetime, according to the National Cancer Institute, and more than 2.9 million patients diagnosed with it at some point are still alive today. And from a treatment perspective, it tends to be problematic -- prostate cancer is frequently non-aggressive, making it difficult to determine which, if any, procedures might be necessary. Google has made headway in diagnosing it, encouragingly, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). In a paper ("Development and Validation of a Deep Learning Algorithm for Improving Gleason Scoring of Prostate Cancer") and accompanying blog post, Google AI researchers describe a system that uses the Gleason score -- a grading system that classifies cancer cells based on how closely they resemble normal prostate glands -- to detect problematic masses in samples. The goal, according to technical lead Martin Stumpe and Google AI Healthcare product manager Craig Mermel, was to develop AI that could perform Gleason grading objectively -- and precisely.