AI can help doctors better assess mammograms AI-assisted mammography detected breast cancers more accurately Fewer women had to return for a follow-up exam TUESDAY, June 4, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Artificial intelligence (AI) can improve doctors’ assessments of mammograms , accurately detecting even the smallest breast cancers with fewer scary false positive readings, a new study shows. AI-assisted mammography detected significantly more breast cancers, with a lower false-positive rate, than doctors assessing mammograms on their own, researchers reported June 4 in the journal Radiology . Nearly 21% fewer women had to come back for a follow-up mammogram when AI helped doctors analyze breast imaging, researchers found.
“We believe AI has the potential to improve screening performance,” said researcher Andreas Lauritzen , a post-doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. For the study, researchers had human radiologists read the mammograms of nearly 61,000 Danish women ages 50 to 69 who were screened between October 2020 and November 2021, before AI was available for this purpose. Then, between November 2021 and October 2022, the team had an AI program perform the first analysis of breast screenings for more than 58,000 women.
Mammograms deemed normal by AI were then given a second going-over by human radiologists, to confirm the program’s analysis. Screening assisted by AI detected more breast cancers (0.8% versus 0.
7%) and had a lower false-positive .
