Now make mammograms not $500 and not have a 6 month waiting time and make them available for women under 40. Then this’ll be a useful breakthrough
It’s already this way in most of the world.
Unfortunately AI models like this one often never make it to the clinic. The model could be impressive enough to identify 100% of cases that will develop breast cancer. However if it has a false positive rate of say 5% it’s use may actually create more harm than it intends to prevent.
Another big thing to note, we recently had a different but VERY similar headline about finding typhoid early and was able to point it out more accurately than doctors could.
But when they examined the AI to see what it was doing, it turns out that it was weighing the specs of the machine being used to do the scan… An older machine means the area was likely poorer and therefore more likely to have typhoid. The AI wasn’t pointing out if someone had Typhoid it was just telling you if they were in a rich area or not.
That’s actually really smart. But that info wasn’t given to doctors examining the scan, so it’s not a fair comparison. It’s a valid diagnostic technique to focus on the particular problems in the local area.
“When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras” (outside of Africa)
