A medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool helped identify signs of breast cancer in 11 women that doctors had missed, potentially heralding better, more efficient cancer screening.
Mia can detect cancer that doctors overlooked
You 11 cases were part of a mass trial of AI mammograms in the United Kingdom's National Health Service, which covered 10,889 patients, according to the BBC. The AI, called Mia, was developed by British company Kheiron Medical Technologies.
The assay was used by NHS Grampian, a health authority in Scotland, with Data analyzed via Microsoft's Azure cloud networkaccording to a press release from Microsoft.
According to the press release, the tool allowed doctors to detect 12% more cancers than what was normally expected. The company stated that its use could reduce the medical workload of exams by 30%, making the process faster and more efficient.
In addition to being faster than humans, AI appears to have detected signals that not even highly trained professionals could. The most surprising discovery was that of 11 women whose AI saw tumors too small for radiologists to detect trained.
One of them, mentioned in Microsoft's press release, was a woman called Barbara (her surname was not given), from the Scottish city of Aberdeen.
My cancer was so small that doctors said it wouldn't have been detected by the human eye.
Barbara mentioned.
She described the Mia technology as “a life saver.” The BBC said her 6mm tumor only required minimal surgery and five days of radiotherapy.
According to the BBC, there have been no cases in which human doctors have detected a case of cancer that AI had not detected.
If we detect a cancer smaller than 15 mm, most women will now have a 95% survival rate.
Mia not only helped us find more cancers, most of which were invasive and high-grade, but we also calculated that it could reduce the time it took to notify women from 14 days to just 3 days, significantly reducing stress.
Said Dr. Gerald Lip, who led the study.
Dr Gerald Lip, Clinical Director of Breast Screening in the North West of Scotland
AI technology could revolutionize cancer detection
The tool could change the way medical services work with cancer patients in the long term.
Professor Lesley Anderson, Chair of Health Data Science at the University of Aberdeen, said the tool would significantly improve breast screening as more cancers would be detected without having to ask patients to take additional tests.
The trial was funded by the UK government and caught the attention of its most senior ministers.
Jeremy Hunt, British finance minister, https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1770822737533038641 that “innovations like this can lead to huge improvements in the productivity of our public services”.
