Adamson, Welch: Using artificial intelligence to diagnose cancer could mean unnecessary treatments

The new decade opened with some intriguing news: The journal Nature reported that artificial intelligence was better at identifying breast cancers on mammograms than radiologists. Researchers at Google Health teamed up with academic medical centers in the United States and Britain to train an AI system using tens of thousands of mammograms. To understand why, it helps to have a sense of how AI systems learn. In this case, the system was trained with images labeled as either "cancer" or "not cancer." From them, it learned to deduce features -- such as shape, density and edges -- that are associated with the cancer label.