Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising all industries in this digital age. It is transforming the way we interact, consume information, and obtain goods and services across industries. The AI sector, valued at about $600 million in 2014, is projected to reach $150 billion by 2026.
AI is redrawing the healthcare landscape too thanks to the Big Data and Machine Learning that help to predict, comprehend, learn and act. According to Frost & Sullivan, AI is expected to generate $6.7 billion in revenue from healthcare globally by the year 2021.
Early-stage cancer detection could reduce breast cancer death rates. However, spotting and diagnosing breast cancer early remains a challenge. Detection today is performed through digital mammography, but reading breast x-ray images is a difficult task, even for experts, and this can often result in both false positives and false negatives. Of late, the tech giant Google claims to have developed an AI model that can spot breast cancer more accurately than a human radiologist.
“In an independent study of six radiologists, the AI system outperformed all of the human readers: the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) for the AI system was greater than the AUC-ROC for the average radiologist by an absolute margin of 11.5 per cent,” Google states in a blog post. The model was trained from de-identified mammograms of 76,000 women in the UK and 15,000 women in the US.
Google is looking forward to prospective clinical studies and the regulatory approval of how AI can aid in breast cancer detection and in the coming years, the company hopes to translate machine learning research into tools that benefit clinicians and patients.
Further, in this age of the genome, DNA research is coming of age. Genomics, defined as the study of genes and their functions, is at the forefront of the information revolution that is sweeping across healthcare. AI can enable gaining perspective on the particular genetic blueprint faster and more accurate. Thus, AI can power the healthcare sector to leapfrog into the future.
