In today’s age of AI, Google has shown that AI could become a very important and valuable asset in cancer detection. Google’s research department has developed a deep learning tool that can spot advanced breast cancer with a better and greater precision than pathologists.
Lymph Node Assistant, aka LYNA is a trained algorithm that can recognize the characteristics of tumors using two sets of pathological slides, giving it the ability to spot metastasis in a wide variety of conditions. The LYNA tool demonstrated incredible accuracy in determining whether breast cancer had spread to a patient’s lymph nodes.
LYNA was able to correctly distinguish a slide with metastatic cancer from a slide without cancer 99% of the time. Further, LYNA was able to accurately pinpoint the location of both cancers and other suspicious regions within each slide, some of which were too small to be consistently detected by pathologists.
In terms of diagnostic accuracy, pathologists in this study were able to more reliably detect micrometastases with LYNA, reducing the rate of missed micrometastases by a factor of two. Encouragingly, pathologists with LYNA assistance were more accurate than either unassisted pathologists or the LYNA algorithm itself, suggesting that people and algorithms can work together effectively to perform better than either alone.
This suggests the intriguing potential for assistive technologies such as LYNA to reduce the burden of repetitive identification tasks and to allow more time and energy for pathologists to focus on other, more challenging clinical and diagnostic tasks.
Source: Google
