Baidu Research's breast cancer detection algorithm outperforms human pathologists

Baidu Research today announced it has developed a deep learning algorithm that in initial tests outperforms human pathologists in its ability to identify breast cancer metastasis. The convolutional neural net was trained by splitting 400 large images into grids of tens of thousands of smaller images, then randomly selecting 200,000 of those smaller images. The algorithm then performs analysis to classify each of the smaller photos as well as its neighboring cells. A variety of algorithms have been introduced to help pathologists examine images that can be gigabytes in size by cutting them into smaller parts. Baidu Research's algorithm attempts to move this technique forward by mimicking a pathologist's method to examine the area surrounding a breast cancer tumor cell, at once examining individual cells and nearby cells.