To help women know if they will develop breast cancer in the next 5 years, researchers have successfully developed new artificial intelligence.
- Every year, more than 50,000 women develop breast cancer in France and 12,000 die from it.
- In order to improve screening for this disease, researchers have designed artificial intelligence capable of correctly predicting the risk of breast cancer over 5 years.
- Their work focused on mammograms obtained from patients in the EMory BrEast imaging Dataset (EMBED) and collected from January 2013 to December 2020.
A new model of artificial intelligence called “AsymMirai” correctly predicts the 5-year risk of breast cancer from mammograms.
To achieve this result, the designers of the model perfected an artificial intelligence named Mirai during its development in 2021.
“Mirai is a state-of-the-art machine learning algorithm for predicting short-term breast cancer risk that outperforms standard clinical risk models,” the researchers first explain in their report published in the journal Radiology. “However, Mirai is a true black box, which risks leading to overconfidence in the algorithm and misdiagnoses,” they estimate.
Breast Cancer Screening: “AsymMirai is Much Simpler”
Their goal was therefore “to create a simplified and intelligible model called AsymMirai, and to determine whether it could approach Mirai’s performance in predicting breast cancer risk at 1-5 years.”
With this in mind, their work focused on mammograms obtained from patients from the EMory BrEast imaging Dataset (EMBED) and collected from January 2013 to December 2020.
Results: In addition to being as effective as Mirai, “AsymMirai is much simpler and much easier to understand” Jon Donnelly says on thema-radiologie.fr website.
“We actually found that Mirai uses comparisons between the left and right sides of breast tissue, which allowed us to design a much simpler network that also makes comparisons between sides.”he specifies. “Our artificial intelligence could, in the not-too-distant future, affect how often women get mammograms.” he judges.
Breast cancer screening: a controversial topic
Already in 2021, Mirai designers were stating similar analyses.Despite the widespread adoption of breast cancer screening, the practice is controversial. Proponents of more aggressive screening strategies aim to maximize the benefits of early detection, while proponents of less frequent screening aim to reduce false-positive evaluations, anxiety, and unnecessary costs for patients who will never develop breast cancer in their lifetime,” they recalled in their report.
“We believe that both goals of early detection and reduction of overtreatment can be achieved by leveraging more accurate risk models. With Mirai, we can offer more targeted screening to women who will develop cancer. This would enable earlier detection of the disease while reducing unnecessary screening and overtreatment for others,” they concluded.
The two artificial intelligences mentioned in this article are not yet on the market.
Every year, more than 50,000 women develop breast cancer in France and 12,000 die from it.
