Google has licensed its AI breast cancer detection model to a medical technology company, paving the way for the researchers’ developed system to be tested in real clinical settings for the first time.
The company, called iCAD, will begin to integrate Google’s computer vision system, designed to detect breast cancer in mammograms, to build a product that should reach hospitals in a few years. We talked about this two years ago.
As reported, iCAD will use the services of the google cloud to develop data storage infrastructure securely. A company spokesman acknowledged that they had secured Google’s technology for the next five years.
Google has spent years building an AI model for help doctors diagnose breast cancer more accurately from mammograms. In 2020, a team from published a paper in Nature stating that AI could outperform professional radiologists in detecting cancerous breast tissue.
How AI that detects cancer works
The system had lower false positive and false negative rates, compared to six radiologists. It was promoted as a way to reduce unnecessary follow-ups of patients, allowing doctors to prioritize women most at risk of the disease.
Google Health claimed that the model had been trained on data sets from mammograms of over 76,000 women in the UK and over 15,000 in the US. As you can see, Google is much more than Chrome or Android (The health sector is one of its most precious branches).
In the experiments, the model reduced false positives by 5.7% in the United States and by 1.2% in the United Kingdomas well as 9.4% false negatives in the United States and 2.7% in the United Kingdom.
Doctors and researchers previously criticized Google for not sharing the code for the model, to allow others to replicate and validate the results, months after the article was published. Now, the code will reach hospitals to try to save lives.