Artificial intelligence is reportedly advancing work in the fight against cancer.
Dr. Laurie Margolies, chief of breast imaging at Mount Sinai Health System, told CBS News this week the technology is being used to detect breast cancer.
“I think artificial intelligence has the ability to make us be even better physicians than we might otherwise be, by teaching us what are the risk factors, what makes a certain pattern of breast tissue be at high risk,” she explained, noting that AI can see things the naked eye might miss on a mammogram.
“It’s the AI that does the first pass. It puts a mammogram into one of three buckets. One bucket is the computer thinks has a very low chance that there’s a cancer on here, and then there’s a middle range where it says there may be a cancer here, look carefully. And then there’s a high range that says there’s an elevated risk of cancer on these mammograms. Look really carefully at the spots we’ve marked,” Margolies said.
Koios DS Breast — an AI-powered, ultrasound-reading software platform that can spot cancer in two seconds — was gifted to the Department of Radiology.
A doctor examines mammograms as part of a regular cancer prevention medical checkup at a clinic in France. (REUTERS/Eric Gaillard)
Mount Sinai says the software ensures that physicians have advanced technology to aid them in making rapid and accurate diagnoses and in reducing biopsies.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, Koios DS Breast compares ultrasounds to an archive of hundreds of thousands of images from patients from around the world with confirmed benign or malignant diagnoses.
These women often require an ultrasound to capture images of areas of the breast that could be harder to see.
Dr. Raj Jena, an oncologist at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, spearheaded research using the AI system “OSAIRIS.” (Microsoft)
However, doctors say it is still crucial to keep up with annual screenings and mammograms.
Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States.
Microsoft said the system named “OSAIRIS” allows planning treatments more than twice as fast as if specialists were working alone.