NHS AI test spots tiny cancers missed by doctors

An AI tool tested by an NHS hospital trust successfully identified tiny signs of breast cancer in 11 women which had been missed by human doctors.

Because it works instantly, tools like Mia also have the potential to reduce the waiting time for results from 14 days down to three, claims its developer Kheiron.

Currently two radiologists look at each individual scan, but the hope is that one of them could one day be replaced by the tool, effectively halving the workload for each pair.

Of the 10,889 women who participated in the trial, only 81 did not want the AI tool to review their scans, said Dr Gerald Lip, clinical director of breast screening in the north west of Scotland and the doctor who led the project.

AI tools are generally pretty good at spotting symptoms of a specific disease, if they are trained on enough data to enable them to be identified.

Image caption, Dr Gerald Lip ran the evaluation of the AI tool at NHS Grampian