Google on Friday claimed that its algorithm can assist doctors in metastatic breast cancer detection with 99 percent accuracy, according to their papers published in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and The American Journal of Surgical Pathology.
The algorithm technology, known as Lymph Node Assistant, or LYNA, is taught to check the abnormality in the pathology slides and accurately pinpoint the location of both cancers and other suspicious regions since some of the potential risks are too small to be spotted by the doctors.
Lymph node tissue from a breast cancer patient, with Google's tool at work on the right. /Photo via Google AI blog
In their latest research, Google applied LYNA to a de-identified dataset from both Camelyon Challenge and an independent dataset from the Naval Medical Center San Diego for picking up the cancer cells from the tissue images. It turned out LYNA proved its credibility and efficiency to its job.
According to Google's second paper, the use of LYNA made the task subjectively "easier" for the pathologists and halved average slide review time, requiring about one minute instead of two minutes per slide.
More importantly, LYNA was also able to correctly distinguish a slide with metastatic cancer from a slide without cancer 99 percent of the time.
For cancer detection and treatment, pathologists' microscopic examination, which based on the results of reviewing patients slides, plays a vital role in the therapy. But analyzing the disease from those megapixel photos is a difficult task, doctors who are competent for the job must have years of training and experience.
This breakthrough suggests the huge potential of what assistive technology can bring to human life and to what extent the tool can help to reduce the burden of repetitive identification tasks so that doctors are allowed to allocate more energy on other challenging tasks.
"This represents a demonstration that people can work really well with AI algorithms than either one alone,” Yun Liu, a member of the Google AI team and an author on the papers told Business Insider.
In China, using AI to detect cancer has undergone the clinical trial. A hospital in southern China has been working with the Chinese tech giant Tencent to diagnose some types of cancer at the early stages.
Last November, the Chinese government also announced plans to build a national platform for AI diagnostic imaging - a commitment to AI as a pillar in the future of Chinese medicine.