Doctors could soon spend less time looking at mammograms, thanks to artificial intelligence

In the US alone, tens of millions of mammograms are performed each year. Analyzing these images takes up a lot of doctors' time. The use of computer assistance to help read mammograms is becoming widespread, but doubts persist about whether the practice is helpful enough to justify its steep price tag. Lower-cost deep learning systems, which train themselves to recognize cancer, could help. Thanks to deep-learning methods like those more commonly used to spot everyday objects in photographs, a new system identified cancer's precise location more than 90 percent of the time in tests.