Cancer is one of the dreaded diseases that anyone has to deal with, something that can be addressed once immediately detected. The problem is that a person may not know they have it until they undergo the necessary tests or when they feel something different in daily life.
Technology has made a difference in the medical industry. It has come up with different medical solutions and more are expected to follow. The latest could be a crucial breakthrough for folks wary of the Big C, particularly women who want to avoid breast cancer.
According to Engadget, Google may have stumbled upon something using its AI technology to help in the early detection of cancer. Company researchers have reportedly come up with a learning tool that can spot metastatic (advanced) breast cancer with greater accuracy than what a pathologist does when looking at both sides.
It seems that all this was a result of the Lymph Node Assistant (LYNA) which can recognize the characteristics of tumors by using two sets of pathological slides. The result from this team trained algorithm is the ability to spot the metastasis under different conditions. Hence, Google AI can now tell the difference between a cancer and non-cancer slide at 99-percent of the time even when looking at extremely small metastases that humans may miss out on.
The breakthrough also serves as a critical aid to pathologists who perform diagnoses. With deep learning technology aiding them, it not only reduces the probability of missing micro-metastases but also helps cuts the inspection time to just a single minute.
While this development is welcome in the battle against cancer, it remains that future work is needed to improve the algorithm’s accuracy and efficiency, Venture Beat said. The only thing certain right now is that it does help improve a pathologist’s productivity and reduce the number of false negatives associated with morphologic detection of tumor cells.
Such is the latest from Google who has invested heavily in AI healthcare applications. The cancer detection breakthrough follows previous milestones such as the likelihood of hospital re-admission that would be needed for certain patients.
Even before that, Google (in collaboration with Verify) also came up with a machine that could deduce information about a person such as their age and blood pressure plus determine if they were at risk of suffering any major cardiac event such as a heart attack.
More medical breakthroughs from Google’s AI research division should be out moving forward as the company continues to find ways to improve medical healthcare and save lives.
