For the past year, artificial intelligence has been assisting radiologists at the women’s imaging center at Saint-Joseph Hospital in Marseille. A very valuable aid in the screening and diagnosis of breast cancer.
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One in eight French women are affected by breast cancer. Mammography is the essential step in screening for this pathology, the most common cancer in women. It represents 60,000 new cases and 12,000 deaths per year. At the Saint-Joseph hospital in Marseille, Artificial Intelligence (AI) now supports radiologists inimage analysis.
For Dr. Alix Ruocco, radiologist, this help is valuable in the face of an ever-increasing demand for imaging in a context of chronic lack of radio technicians as well as doctors to interpret the images. “AI is never tired”, recognizes the specialist from the women’s center. This tool was created to detect a mass, a small distortion in the architecture of the breast, or small grouped micro-calcifications…
“It was radiologists who supervised her” and “who taught her what she knows how to do,” based on images with certain diagnoses, she explains. “The AI has been trained on millions of mammograms to identify what cancer is” in all its forms. That’s what makes it strong.” “AI comes second to support my diagnosis”said Dr Ruocco. “AI plus radiologist alone, it’s superior to radiologist alone in terms of detection performance, it’s a real added value”she summarizes.
Almost at the same time as the doctor, the AI reads the images from the day’s mammogram and compares them to its enormous data base.
No lesion, even the most subtle, can escape it. “It’s as if we were working with two, two readings, that’s the purpose of Artificial Intelligence coupled with the radiologist, it is to actually gain in detection rate, to see smaller lesions, to take charge more quickly with less heavy therapies”, estimates Valérie Doucet, radiologist, specialist in women’s imaging at Saint-Joseph Hospital.
Currently, in France, 20% of mammograms are analyzed with the help of AI.
