How A.I. Is Being Used to Detect Cancer That Doctors Miss – The New York Times

“I was shockingly surprised at how good it was,” Dr. Tabár said. He said that he did not have any financial connections to Kheiron when he first tested the technology and has since received an advisory fee for feedback to improve the systems. Systems he tested from other A.I. companies, including Lunit Insight from South Korea and Vara from Germany, have also delivered encouraging detection results, he said.

Kheiron’s technology was first used on patients in 2021 in a small clinic in Budapest called MaMMa Klinika. After a mammogram is completed, two radiologists review it for signs of cancer. Then the A.I. either agrees with the doctors or flags areas to check again.

Kheiron said the technology worked best alongside doctors, not in lieu of them. Scotland’s National Health Service will use it as an additional reader of mammography scans at six sites, and it will be in about 30 breast cancer screening sites operated by England’s National Health Service by the end of the year. Oulu University Hospital in Finland plans to use the technology as well, and a bus will travel around Oman this year to perform breast cancer screenings using A.I.

“An A.I.-plus-doctor should replace doctor alone, but an A.I. should not replace the doctor,” Mr. Kecskemethy said.

The National Cancer Institute has estimated that about 20 percent of breast cancers are missed during screening mammograms.

Constance Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and chief of breast imaging and radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, urged doctors to keep an open mind.

“We are not irrelevant,” she said, “but there are tasks that are better done with computers.”

At Bács-Kiskun County Hospital outside Budapest, Dr. Ambrózay said she had initially been skeptical of the technology — but was quickly won over. She pulled up the X-ray of a 58-year-old woman with a tiny tumor spotted by the A.I. that Dr. Ambrózay had a hard time seeing.

The A.I. saw something, she said, “that seemed to appear out of nowhere.”