Google’s Artificial Intelligence to Cure Breast Cancer

Google has recently announced that they have achieved successful results in using artificial intelligence to identify breast cancer. This emphasizes the advances in artificial intelligence and its potential to improve global health. Provided by the Dutch University, Google used deep learning – which is where computers are taught to recognize patterns in huge data sets, to analyse thousands of slides of cancer cells.

With the increasing number of breast cancer cases each year, Google hopes that its technology will help pathologists with their treatment of patients. However, Google’s technology is not designed to, or is capable of replacing human doctors. Lily Peng, the project manager behind Google’s work said, "What we've trained is just a little sliver of software that helps with one part of a very complex series of tasks." Adding that "there will hopefully be more and more of these tools that help doctors who have to go through an enormous amount of information all the time.

" Peng has described to the media how the human and the computer will work together to create better outcomes. Google’s artificial intelligence system excels at being very sensitive to potential cancer, it will pick up things a human will miss but at times will falsely identify something as cancer, whereas a human pathologist is better at saying, "no, this isn't cancer." Presently, Google's progress is still in research mode but are aimed at making this a reality.

An associate professor in digital pathology at Radboud University Medical Centre, Jeroen van der Laak, believes that the first algorithms for cancer will be available within a couple years. Google’s technology will be usefully in parts of the world where there is a shortage of physicians such as India and China; or for patients who do not have access to pathologist.