Giant Tech’ Google has developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve breast cancer detection results. Google Health Product Manager Daniel Tse said for two years Google worked with clinical research partners in the United States and United Kingdom to find out whether AI could carry out breast detection processes.

According to Daniel, who is fondly called Dan, using a combination of machine learning and AI screening or early detection of breast cancer can be faster. “This is a technique where you can use a computer to teach programs and classify images based on examples,” he said through a video conference at the Google Indonesia Office, South Jakarta, Tuesday, February 4, 2020.

In Indonesia, according to the Ministry of Health, there are two types of cancer that most affects Indonesian women, namely breast cancer and cervical cancer. As of January 31, 2019, the Ministry of Health released data that there were breast cancer sufferers at 42.1 per 100,000 female population with an average death rate of 17 per 100,000 population.

While the most common method of detecting breast cancer is using digital mammography or X-rays, which do more than 42 million examinations annually in the United States and the United Kingdom. The problem, said Dan, is that when there is a large gap in the expertise in radiology with the number of people who want to be examined.

“At the same time often the tasks required of radiologists from expert doctors become increasingly complicated. “There are more and more complicated tasks from time to time, especially because there are more and more parts of the disease around cardiovascular disease,” Dan said.

Why does Google help see this problem? And believe that there are many offers by taking a machine learning model and applying it to the problem of breast cancer. “To give you context about why we are interested in seeing breast cancer, this is one of the most common causes of cancer in the world with nearly two million new cases of breast cancer every year,” he continued.

Google’s research was carried out in collaboration with partners at DeepMind, Cancer Research UK Imperial Center, Northwestern University, and Royal Surrey County hospital. Google’s AI model is trained on a representative database consisting of mammographic imaging without the identification of more than 76,000 women in the United Kingdom and more than 15,000 women in the United States.

The study was to determine whether the learning data model found signs of breast cancer on the results of the examination. Then Senior Health Software Engineer Google Shravya Shetty said, the model was evacuated in a separate data set, which consisted of mammographic imaging without the identification of more than 25,000 women in Britain and more than 3,000 women in America.

“Our system has a false-positive decline of 5.7 percent in the United States and 1.2 percent in the UK, and a false-negative reduction of 9.4 percent in the United States and 2.7 percent in the UK,” Shetty added.

In addition, Google is also examining whether the model can be applied more generally to other health care systems. To that end, Shetty added, she trained the model using data from women in the UK and then evaluated the data set from women in America.

In this experiment, there was a decrease in false positives by 3.5 percent and a decrease in false negatives by 8.1 percent. “The results of this study indicate that the model has the potential to be applied more generally for use in new clinical fields, and still provide more accurate results than do the experts,” he said.