A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has developed a new AI model that can predict the likelihood of a woman developing breast cancer, up to five years in advance.
Existing technology for detecting breast cancer is largely based on human knowledge and risk factors in individual women. On the other hand, this new model learned from 90,000 mammograms to derive signs common in breast cancer patients and foresee “subtle patterns in breast tissue that are precursors to malignant tumors”. As a result, the model was successful at identifying 31 percent of cancer patients as high risk, compared to 18 percent by other traditional models.