OSLO: The Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI) said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence can detect women who are at a higher risk of getting breast cancer years before the disease is discovered.
A commercially accessible AI application was made available to five researchers from FHI, the University of California, and the University of Washington so they could analyze the mammograms of 116,495 women who participated in a Norwegian detection program between 2004 and 2018. Of the women, 1,607 got breast cancer in total.
Four to six years prior to a diagnosis, the algorithm was able to determine which breast was at risk and forecast which women had a higher chance of getting breast cancer.
The head of the AI project and detection software, Solveig Hofvind, stated, “We noticed that the breast that developed cancer had an AI score roughly twice as high as the other breast.” “The study demonstrates that more individualized detection programs can be created using the AI algorithms currently on the market,” she said.
According to FHI, AI might be used to better target at-risk groups, lower expenses, and diagnose breast cancer early.
Breast cancer, the most prevalent type of cancer among women in the majority of countries, claimed 670,000 lives in 2022, according to the World Health Organization. The Journal of the American Medical Association Network, which oversees a number of esteemed medical periodicals, published the study.
Last year, the Norwegian detection program also started a study with 140,000 women to see if AI could diagnose cancer cases as effectively as or even more accurately than radiologists.