‘AI significantly more value to us,’ Anand Mahindra reacts after AI detected breast cancer years before it developed

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is employed in breast cancer screening to detect potential problems well before they become serious.

According to media reports, this technology is currently proving effective in Hungary, and the US, UK, and other European countries are also considering its implementation. 

Reacting to a post on X, Mahindra's chairperson, Anand Mahindra, said, “If this is accurate, then AI is going to be of significantly more value to us than we imagined and much earlier than we had imagined.”

Although there are still challenges to overcome, this technology has the potential to be a crucial asset for radiologists and could ultimately save lives.

According to a research article by Science Translational Medicine, In computational terms, risk assessment can be viewed as a prediction task, where the model is trained to associate features of mammograms with future cancer diagnoses.

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It further read, “It requires risk prediction at various time points, the ability to leverage potentially missing nonimage data (such as age and family history), and consistent performance across heterogeneous mammography devices.”

As per a report by MIT News, two years ago, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Jameel Clinic introduced a deep learning system designed to assess cancer risk based on mammograms alone. The model demonstrated notable effectiveness and inclusivity, providing equal accuracy for white and Black women. This is particularly significant as Black women face a 43 percent higher likelihood of dying from breast cancer.

Mint could not independently confirm the development.

According to the New York Times, the implementation of AI technology in breast cancer screening has decreased radiologists' workloads by approximately 30 percent while boosting cancer detection rates by 13 percent. This is largely positive news.

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The report also highlighted that the AI was tested on some of the most challenging cancer cases, where early signs of breast cancer had previously gone unnoticed by radiologists, and the AI successfully identified the cancer.