Technology | 01.14.22
The First AI Breast Cancer Sleuth That Shows Its Work
by Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering
An artificial intelligence (AI) platform developed by researchers at Duke University analyzes mammography scans to determine whether patients should undergo an invasive biopsy and features an interpretable algorithm that shows how it made its decision. The AI was trained with more than 1,100 images from 484 patients. The AI was first trained to locate the suspicious lesions and ignore healthy tissue and other irrelevant data, after which radiologists labeled the images to teach the AI to focus on the edges of the lesions. Duke's Alina Barnett comments, "Other AIs are not trying to imitate radiologists; they're coming up with their own methods for answering the question that are often not helpful or, in some cases, depend on flawed reasoning processes." The researchers found that the AI performed as well as other black box computer models, though it did not outperform human radiologists.
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