MIT AI Expert Uses AI To Save Lives

 MIT's New AI System Mirai Transforming Mammograms

         Source: Stock AI, Mammograms & MIT's Regina Barzilay

From a Cancer Diagnosis to a Potentially Breakthrough, New AI 

This is the story of an MIT artificial intelligence expert who turned her personal challenge with breast cancer into a new AI system that can predict the dreaded disease up to 5 years before it occurs.  Forecasting the disease so far in advance enables possible early intervention, treatment and prevention.  The new AI could benefit millions of people.  About 8 years ago, MIT's Regina Barzilay endured the brutal side effects of chemotherapy, radiation and 2 lumpectomies to overcome her cancer. When she returned to work at MIT, she decided to use her AI expertise to battle breast cancer and save lives.

Brand New AI System

Barzilay has designed and developed an AI system called Mirai that predicts breast cancer up to five years before there is any sign of it.  Using hundreds of thousands of mammograms and analyzing the pixel data from them, Mirai is able to predict with stunning accuracy whether a healthy person will develop breast cancer within the next five years.

How It Works

Barzilay and her team fed into Mirai 200,000 mammograms of people who got and did not get breast cancer from Massachusetts General Hospital, where Barzilay underwent cancer treatment.  All of this data was used to train Mirai's algorithm through scanning the data and making predictions.  Mirai learned what future breast cancer looks like and does not look like in the mammograms.  Once Mirai was trained, Barzilay took another 129,000 mammograms from 7 hospitals in 5 nations.  Mirai then analyzed the data and made more predictions.  The results are astounding.  On average, Mirai was correct in predicting whether cancer would or wouldn't develop in 76 out of 100 cases or a 76% accuracy rate.

What Is Next & What Is the Potential?

The AI predictions need to be further validated and clinical trials are about to get underway both in the US and Mexico.  Top global experts in breast cancer are very encouraged about this new AI system.  It could enable much earlier intervention, treatment and even prevention of breast cancer.  Incredibly, Barzilay has not patented her new AI system.  She has made it open source so that hospitals around the world will be able to use it in the future.