Using AI to Detect Cancer, Not Just Cats

And just last week, the data science competition site Kaggle announced the winners of a $1 million contest in which more than 10,000 researchers competed to build machine learning models that could detect lung cancer from CT scans. This is an old idea, dating back to the 1950s, but now that operations like Google and Facebook have access to such enormous amounts of data and computing power, neural networks can achieve far more than they could in the past. Through the Kaggle contest, run in tandem with the tech-minded consultancy Booz Allen, thousands of data scientists competed to build the most accurate neural networks for the task. Before a neural network can start learning the task from a collection of images, trained doctors must label them--that is, use their human intelligence and knowledge to identify the images that show signs of lung cancer.