MRI scans provide more detailed images than conventional mammography. At the same time, it takes a lot of time for radiologists to go through MRI images to assess them for tumors.
Now, researchers at a university hospital in the Netherlands have shown that artificial intelligence (AI) can do some of this work.
“We know that there will be fewer hands available per patient in the health care system in the future, which makes it important to find methods that enable us to solve our tasks with fewer resources,” Solveig Roth Hoff wrote in an email to sciencenorway.no.
Hoff is a section chief physician at Ålesund Hospital and studies imaging techniques that can detect breast cancer.
Artificial intelligence, which is basically a computer program, identified 40 percent of the healthy breasts.
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And none of the breasts that actually contained cancerous tumors were misclassified by the program.
“The results were better than expected,” said Erik Verburg at University Medical Center Utrecht in a press release. Verburg is one of the researchers behind the new study.
“Forty percent is a good start. At the same time, we still have sixty percent to improve,” Verburg said.
