Google has licensed its AI breast cancer detection model to a commercial medical technology company, paving the way for the researcher-developed system to be tested in real clinical settings for the first time.
The partnership with iCAD, a New Hampshire-based maker of cancer detection and radiation therapy equipment, was announced Monday. The company will begin integrating Google’s computer vision system, designed to detect breast cancer in mammograms, to build a product that will eventually be commercially available to health care providers.
Under the agreement, iCAD will use Google Cloud services to develop an infrastructure to store data securely. An iCAD spokesperson said Register had agreed to license Google’s breast cancer screening model for five years.
“There will be a regulatory approval process that will follow the completion of the commercial product. While these dates are difficult to predict and are subject to change, we are estimating the availability of an iCAD cloud offering by the end of 2023 and the solution of artificial intelligence with Google AI in the first half of 2024, depending on the time required to achieve regulatory clearance,” the spokesperson added.
Google has been building an artificial intelligence model to help doctors diagnose breast cancer from mammograms more accurately for years. In 2020, a team of computer scientists (from Google Health, DeepMind, Verily Sciences, and universities in the UK and US, including Northwestern University, Imperial College London, and the University of Cambridge) published a paper in Nature claiming that AI could outperform professional radiologists in detecting cancerous breast tissue.
The system reportedly had lower false positive and false negative rates, compared to six radiologists. It was touted as a way to reduce unnecessary patient follow-ups, allowing doctors to prioritize women most at risk of having the disease, speeding up diagnosis.
google health said the model had been trained on mammography datasets of more than 76,000 women in the UK and more than 15,000 women in the US. It led to a 5.7% reduction in false positives in the US and a 1.2% reduction in the UK, as well as a 9.4% reduction in false negatives in the US and a 2.7% reduction in the UK in expert experiments.
Physicians and researchers formerly criticized the company for not sharing the model code, to allow others to replicate and validate the results, months after the publication of the article. The code is now shared as a commercial license for companies that can deploy it in clinical settings for real patients.
“Google Health’s AI technology could be used to make healthcare more available, more accessible, and more accurate,” Greg Corrado, Google’s director of health AI. said in a sentence.
“But achieving change like this will only be possible if we work closely with forward-thinking partners, those with a deep tradition of pioneering innovation and the market expertise and wherewithal to put innovations into real workflows.”
“Google Health’s work with iCAD is a great example of two organizations coming together to leverage our mutual strengths, technological capabilities, and resources to improve breast cancer screening around the world, with the ultimate goal of improving screening outcomes.” health of individuals and communities.
Register has asked Google for a comment. ®
