AI ‘Outperforms’ Doctors Diagnosing Breast Cancer
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This is the first two paragraphs.
Artificial intelligence is more accurate than doctors in diagnosing breast cancer from mammograms, a study in the journal Nature suggests.
An international team, including researchers from Google Health and Imperial College London, designed and trained a computer model on X-ray images from nearly 29,000 women.
I have rarely worked with healthcare data, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of this trial.
However, over fifty years ago, I was able to make a lot of progress in the analysis of mass spectrometry data, by observing operators and asking how they identified various chemicals in the scan from the mass spectrometer.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find some detailed observation of the working methods of radiologists, formed the foundation data for this research.
The research seems to have done it well, judging by the published results.
Should we trust ourselves to methods like this in healthcare?
Undoubtedly! Yes!
Many systems like this are starting to be used in the maintenance of complex entities, as diverse as trains, planes, chemical works and advanced automated distribution depots.
But every fault, is always tested by a trained person.
This is a paragraph from the BBC article.
Prof Ara Darzi, report co-author and director of the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Imperial Centre, told the BBC: “This went far beyond my expectations. It will have a significant impact on improving the quality of reporting, and also free up radiologists to do even more important things.”
I very much feel we will see very much more of this automated testing of the human body! And not just for cancer!
I already know of groups working on automatic diagnosis of arthritis!
Nothing new here – decades ago a consultant would diagnose 70% right first time, but a junior doctor only about 40%, however a junior doctor assisted by a program would do as well as a consultant.
It might be to do with prompting questions like “Have you been abroad recently?”
Comment by R. Mark Clayton | January 2, 2020 |