Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Using AI technology to read mammograms and assist in making diagnoses could put patients at risk, a new study is revealing. Often touted as a "second set of eyes" for radiologists, AI-based mammographic support systems are "extremely promising," said news agency SWNS. But as the technology grows and expands, there are concerns among some that it may make radiologists "favor the AI's suggestion over their own," the agency added.

While there has been controversy over when and how often women should be screened for breast cancer using mammograms, studies consistently show that screening can lead to earlier detection of the disease, when it's more treatable. So improving how effectively mammograms can detect abnormal growths that could be cancerous is a priority in the field. AI could play a role in accomplishing that--computer-based machine learning might help doctors to read mammograms more accurately. In a study published Jan. 1 in Nature, researchers from Google Health, and from universities in the U.S. and U.K., report on an AI model that reads mammograms with fewer false positives and false negatives than human experts. The algorithm, based on mammograms taken from more than 76,000 women in the U.K. and more than 15,000 in the U.S., reduced false positive rates by nearly 6% in the U.S., where women are screened every one to two years, and by 1.2% in the U.K., where women are screened every three years.

To apply artificial intelligence to the task, the authors of the Nature report used mammograms from about 76,000 women in Britain and 15,000 in the United States, whose diagnoses were already known, to train computers to recognize cancer. Then, they tested the computers on images from about 25,000 other women in Britain, and 3,000 in the United States, and compared the system's performance with that of the radiologists who had originally read the X-rays. The mammograms had been taken in the past, so the women's outcomes were known, and the researchers could tell whether the initial diagnoses were correct. "We took mammograms that already happened, showed them to radiologists and asked, 'Cancer or no?' and then showed them to A.I., and asked, 'Cancer, or no?'" said Dr. Mozziyar Etemadi, an author of the study from Northwestern University. This was the test that found A.I. more accurate than the radiologists.

Despite the benefit of a magnifying glass, radiologists analyzing mammograms still recommend biopsies unnecessarily 20 percent of the time. Software developed by Houston Methodist artificial intelligence researchers promises quicker, more accurate results.