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Breast Cancer (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 month ago (25 children)

Unfortunately AI models like this one often never make it to the clinic. The model could be impressive enough to identify 100% of cases that will develop breast cancer. However if it has a false positive rate of say 5% it’s use may actually create more harm than it intends to prevent.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 month ago (11 children)

Another big thing to note, we recently had a different but VERY similar headline about finding typhoid early and was able to point it out more accurately than doctors could.

But when they examined the AI to see what it was doing, it turns out that it was weighing the specs of the machine being used to do the scan... An older machine means the area was likely poorer and therefore more likely to have typhoid. The AI wasn't pointing out if someone had Typhoid it was just telling you if they were in a rich area or not.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (3 children)

That's actually really smart. But that info wasn't given to doctors examining the scan, so it's not a fair comparison. It's a valid diagnostic technique to focus on the particular problems in the local area.

"When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras" (outside of Africa)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

AI is weird. It may not have been given the information explicitly. Instead it could be an artifact in the scan itself due to the different equipment. Like if one scan was lower resolution than the others but you resized all of the scans to be the same size as the lowest one the AI might be picking up on the resizing artifacts which are not present in the lower resolution one.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I'm saying that info is readily available to doctors in real life. They are literally in the hospital and know what the socioeconomic background of the patient is. In real life they would be able to guess the same.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

The manufacturing date of the scanner was actually saved as embedded metadata to the scan files themselves. None of the researchers considered that to be a thing until after the experiment when they found that it was THE thing that the machines looked at.

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