Breast cancer is a serious disease that affects many women.
Doctors usually guess if a woman might get this disease by asking questions and collecting information about her.
This includes her age, if any of her family members have had the disease, and whether she has given birth. They also look at how her breasts appear on a type of X-ray picture called a mammogram.
But, this way of guessing isn’t always perfect because doctors might not have all the information they need.
A New Solution
Now, a team of scientists led by Dr. Vignesh A. Arasu has come up with a smarter way to guess if a woman might get breast cancer.
They used artificial intelligence (AI), which is like a super-smart computer brain, to study mammograms. This AI can look at hundreds or even thousands of details in the mammograms that doctors might not notice.
The Study
Dr. Arasu’s team used mammograms from 2016 of over 300,000 women who visited their clinics in Northern California. Out of these women, they studied a smaller group of about 13,000 women.
They also looked at all the women who were diagnosed with breast cancer within five years of their 2016 mammogram.
The scientists used AI to guess if these women would get breast cancer within five years. They did this using five different AI brains. Two of these were made by other scientists, and three were made by companies.
The Results
The scientists found that all five AI brains were better at guessing if a woman would get breast cancer than the old way of guessing.
They were even good at guessing if a woman would get a type of breast cancer that grows quickly and might need more checks.
For example, when the scientists looked at the women who had the highest risk of getting breast cancer, the AI guessed that up to 28% of them would get the disease.
The old way of guessing only guessed that 21% of them would get the disease.
The AI brains were even good at guessing if a woman would get breast cancer up to five years later, even if she didn’t have the disease when she had her mammogram.
And when the scientists used both the AI and the old way of guessing together, they were even better at predicting breast cancer.
Dr. Arasu said that some hospitals are already using AI to help doctors find breast cancer on mammograms.
He thinks that in the future, the AI’s guess about a woman’s risk of getting breast cancer could be included in her medical report.
This new way of guessing if a woman might get breast cancer could help doctors take better care of each woman.
They could give her the right checks and treatments for her, rather than treating all women the same way. This could help more women stay healthy.
If you care about cancer, please read studies about the causes of cancer, and vitamin D supplements could strongly reduce cancer death.
For more information about cancer, please see recent studies about how drinking milk affects the risks of heart disease and cancer, and results showing low-fat diet could be key to stopping cancer growth.
The study was published in Radiology.
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