Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women, and contrary to popular belief, men to can get breast cancer. One of the biggest issues with breast cancer is that detection can be rather difficult. This is due to the high rates of false positives, which is what happens when a mammogram shows that something is abnormal even when there is no cancer present in the patient. Understandably, this can lead to some pretty distressing times and unnecessary medical interventions.

This is where DeepMind comes in. Deepmind is a UK based artificial intelligence company bought over by Google back in 2014 and the company has recently succeeded in achieving what was previously unheard of, and that is identifying breast cancer from scans with fewer false positives (and false negatives) than experts.

They managed to pull it off by training its AI using de-identified data from patients in the US and the UK, and showed that it could reduce false positives by 5.7 percent and false negatives by 9.4 percent in the US. The most jaw dropping thing about it all is that the AI managed to make screening decisions with greater accuracy than experts with just access to the most recent mammogram of each patient, whereas human experts have access to entire patient histories and much more information.

Its worth noting that its still currently in a very early stage of research and more studies plus cooperation with healthcare providers is needed before this system is ready for widespread use. It is however encouraging news for the human race in general.

All of that being said though, DeepMind does have a history of being used in the medical field and to almost no surprise, has been the subject of controversy. Back in 2017, UK’s NHS shared patient data with the company without the direct consent of patients. At this point, it’s hard to expect anything less of companies, especially ones owned by Google.  It’s safe to say though that this double edged sword certainly brings more good than bad.

What do you guys think?