A.I. Took a Test to Detect Lung Cancer. It Got an A.

The process, known as deep learning, is already being used in many applications, like enabling computers to understand speech and identify objects so that a self-driving car will recognize a stop sign and distinguish a pedestrian from a telephone pole. In medicine, Google has already created systems to help pathologists read microscope slides to diagnose cancer, and to help ophthalmologists detect eye disease in people with diabetes. "We have some of the biggest computers in the world," said Dr. Daniel Tse, a project manager at Google and an author of the journal article. "We started wanting to push the boundaries of basic science to find interesting and cool applications to work on." In the new study, the researchers applied artificial intelligence to CT scans used to screen people for lung cancer, which caused 160,000 deaths in the United States last year, and 1.7 million worldwide.