New Scientist
AI-assisted breast cancer screening reduces aggressive “interval” cancers by 12% compared with standard radiologist-only screening. AI ranks mammograms, flags high-risk scans for extra review, and helps detect small tumors earlier, potentially saving lives.
AI-assisted mammograms cut risk of developing aggressive breast cancer
Author: Carissa Wong
PEOPLE who are screened for breast cancer by AI-supported radiologists are less likely to develop aggressive cancers before their next screening round than those screened by radiologists alone, raising hopes that AI-aided screening could save lives.
“This is the first randomised controlled trial on the use of AI in mammography screening,” says Kristina Lång at Lund University in Sweden.
The AI-supported approach involves using the software – which has been trained on more than 200,000 mammography scans from 10 countries – to rank the likelihood of cancer being present in mammograms on a scale of 1 to 10, based on visual patterns in the scans. The scans receiving a score of 1 to 9 are then assessed by one experienced radiologist, while scans receiving a score of 10 – indicating cancer is most likely to be present – are assessed by two radiologists.
An earlier study found this approach could detect 29 per cent more cancers than standard screening, where each mammogram is assessed by two radiologists, without increasing the rate of false detections. “That was terrific,” says Fiona Gilbert at the University of Cambridge.
12%
How much less likely women who had AI-assisted screening were to develop cancer between scans
Now, Lång and her colleagues have found that the AI approach also reduces the likelihood of people developing so-called interval cancers. These are tumours that develop rapidly in the time interval between screenings and that tend to be particularly aggressive and more likely to spread elsewhere in the body.
The researchers made the discovery during an analysis of more than 100,000 women in Sweden, aged 55 on average. They randomly assigned about half of the women to receive their standard round of breast cancer screening, where each mammogram is assessed by two radiologists. The remaining participants were screened initially by the AI model – which was developed by biotech firm ScreenPoint Medical in Nijmegen, the Netherlands – and then the scans were assessed by radiologists, most of whom had at least five years of experience in analysing mammograms.
The women who received the AI-assisted screening were 12 per cent less likely, on average, to develop an interval cancer than the women who received the standard screening (The Lancet, doi.org/hbmvqw). “When we got the results, we were extremely thrilled,” says Lång.
The improvement may be because the AI is better able to detect cancers at an early stage. So, while radiologists might overlook small tumours that would develop into an interval cancer, the AI can spot them.
Even so, the study was only designed to explore whether AI can work as well as standard screening, not to see if it can perform better, says Lång.
The team didn’t assess whether the AI-supported approach performs better in certain ethnic groups. Further trials, including an ongoing one in the UK, will help address this, says Gilbert.
Credits: TCA, LLC.