Skip to main content

Artificial Intelligence Expedites Breast Cancer Risk Prediction by Haylee Dagley

The article I chose from Biology News Net is called Artificial Intelligence Expedites Breast Cancer Risk Prediction. This article is about researchers at Houston Methodist who have developed an artificial intelligence software that reliably interprets mammograms, which assists doctors with a quick and accurate prediction of breast cancer risk. The software reviews millions of records in a short amount of time, allowing doctors to determine the risk of breast cancer more efficiently using breast cancer. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 12.1 million mammograms are performed in the United States annually. The American Cancer Society claims fifty percent yield false positive results, resulting in one in every two healthy women who are told they have cancer. When mammograms fall into the suspicious category, a range of 3 to 95 percent cancer risk, are recommended biopsies. Over 1.6 million biopsies are performed annually nationwide. About 20 percent of those mammograms are unnecessarily performed due to false positive results of cancer free patients. The researchers on the Houston Methodist team hope that the new artificial intelligence software will better help physicians define the percent risk requiring a biopsy, giving doctors a tool to decrease unnecessary breast biopsies.

This article initially caught my eye because I am very interested in oncology and cancer research. Cancer is a disease that runs in my family. Many of my aunts have been diagnosed with breast cancer. Some have even passed away from the disease.

Breast Cancer is one of the most common types of cancer women are diagnosed with in the United States. However, many women are diagnosed with false positives, which cause them to undergo many unnecessary and expensive medical procedures. The new Artificial Intelligence Software, will reduce the number of false positives and save both physicians and women time and money. This new advanced technology will be very beneficial to women everywhere. It can review hundreds of charts in a fraction of the time. This may help us locate the cancer before it has a chance to spread.

I was very impressed with this article. It gave the reader a lot of insight on how the software will work. It also gave us statistics about breast cancer that supported the use of the software. There isn't anything I would change about this article. It was easy to read and understand what the writer was trying to say. It was so interesting to read about this new advancement in cancer research.


http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2016/08/29/artificial_intelligence_expedites_breast_cancer_risk_prediction.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+biologynews%2Fheadlines+%28Biology+News+Net%29
  

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 27, 2018 at 7:58 AM

    I think it is pretty awesome that software technology for diagnosing cancer is already coming out. I have had a family member diagnosed with cancer too, but luckily it was caught early enough that everything went OK. Reducing the number of false positives could reduce a lot of potential anxiety, and I don't know anyone that would want to put themselves through cancer treatment when they don't have to. Not only do the patients have to unnecessarily go through the treatments, but they probably have to take a big hit financially too, especially if they don't have good insurance. Overall this technology seems to be a positive improvement in healthcare.
    -CS

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 27, 2018 at 8:12 AM

    Probably the most important thing that doctors do is diagnose diseases, and most of them spend around a decade attending school, and participating in internships to be able to do so. As these diagnostic computer technologies advance, and become better than humans, a medical doctor's job seems like it can be replaced by an IT professional that knows a little bit about healthcare. What kinds of things can doctors do once technology has dominated the realm of medical diagnosis?
    -CS

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kill The Pain But Not The Patient

               Opioid’s are a serious problem that according to Edward Bilsky, an opioid pharmacologist and provost at Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences, can potentially be eliminated. Opioid addiction is a problem that needs to be faced as soon as possible. Utah has many different ads that are sure to be seen driving on the freeway, but we are not the only state that has an issue. Many people have died and many more will continue to die “In 2015, 2 million Americans suffered from prescription opioid addiction, and more than 33,000 died of an opioid overdose” (pg. 44) There is a solution to the problem at hand.               In Jonathon Keats’ article, building a better Painkiller, Christopher Stein stumbled upon something that would change the way that opioids are researched. He noticed that among rats an inflamed leg would be numb to the effects of touch, but anot...
22 comments
Read more

Cell phones and Cancer?

Some recent studies are calling us to be more cautious about our cell phone usage. There have been some studies on lab rats over the last two years that have started linking cell phone usage to higher cancer rates. Basically what the experiment was, Scientists exposed a bunch of lab rats to about the same amount of RF radiation (Radio Frequency, the kind of radiation cell phones use to communicate with cell towers) cell phones and wireless routers and basically all of our modern internet devices, expose us to. Long story short the Rats had a noticeably higher rate of schwannomas, and cancer in glial cells than regular non-exposed rats.  There were some other really cool findings from the study too. For example only Male lab rats contracted Schwannomas (cancer of Schwann cells in nerve tissue) and only female lab rats were found to have glioma. (cancer in glial cells, cells that help brain cells) They also found higher levels of other types of cancer such as skin cancer, prostat...
11 comments
Read more

Calories and Ageing

Alison Abbott in her article “Reduced-calorie diet shows signs of slowing ageing in people” (Abbott, A.) describes a part of a trial called the Comprehensive Assessment of Long term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy (CALERIE). The 53 participants in the study were not obese, and they were split into a group that ate 15% less calories than normal, and a control group that ate a normal number of calories. The study lasted for two years. They measured the oxygen intake, carbon dioxide exhaled, and the nitrogen content of urine to come to their conclusions. The calorie restricting group could better use calories then the control group when they were asleep. Abbott talks about how mitochondria is important in the life span of things like worms and flies. We learned in our biology class that the mitochondria is an organelle in a cell that is responsible for the production of atp that provides the energy necessary to power the cell, and my guess is that lowering calorie intake will someho...
12 comments
Read more