How an AI Scientist Turned Her Breast Cancer Diagnosis Into a Tool to Save Lives
When artificial intelligence researcher Regina Barzilay was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, she says she was struck by immediate questions: “Am I going to survive? What’s going to happen to my son?”
But soon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist began asking a broader one: Why couldn’t her cancer have been diagnosed earlier?
Barzilay’s quest to find an answer would lead to a remarkable result: the development of an AI-based system for early detection of breast cancer, with the ability to predict whether a patient is likely to develop the disease in the next five years. A technology that had not yet penetrated the hospital setting now has the potential to save many thousands of lives each year.
Barzilay’s story unfolds as part of a new FRONTLINE documentary, In the Age of AI, that explores both the promise and the perils of artificial intelligence.
The promise includes the fact that, supplied with data from tens of thousands of mammograms and with the ability to understand diagnostic notes, recent advances in deep learning “can take hundreds of thousands of images where the outcome is known and learn… the very unique patterns that correlate highly with future occurrence of the disease,” Barzilay tells FRONTLINE in the above excerpt from the film.
It’s a demonstration of how artificial intelligence can outstrip the limitations of the “human capacity to recognize formalized patterns,” the MIT professor says of the software. It could result in cancers like hers being diagnosed far earlier — before invasive interventions like chemotherapy are necessary.
“When we find it early, we cure it, and we cure it without having the ravages to the body when we diagnose it late,” says Dr. Connie Lehman, head of the Breast Imaging Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, which partnered with Barzilay on developing the new predictive tool.
The above excerpt from In the Age of AI traces Barzilay and Lehman’s efforts and alliance in detail — from Barzilay’s early surprise that standard machine learning techniques weren’t already being applied in hospital settings, to the process of gaining access to thousands of mammograms and records from MGH’s breast imaging program, to what Barzilay and Lehman found when using deep learning to help analyze them.
“We are using technology not only to be better at assessing the breast density, but to get more to the point of what we’re trying to predict: ‘Does this woman have a cancer now and will she develop a cancer in five years?’” Lehman explains.
“It’s going to change the face of breast cancer,” she says of the AI technology.
To learn more, watch In The Age of AI starting November 5. Produced, written and directed by David Fanning and Neil Docherty, the documentary is a comprehensive survey of how artificial intelligence is transforming our world — both for good and for ill. It shows how, in cases like Barzilay’s, AI algorithms are ushering in a new age of great problem-solving potential. But the film also examines AI’s dark side — from fears about the future of work; the growing rivalry between the U.S. and China; and to privacy violations and threats to democracy, at home and abroad.
In the Age of AI premieres Tuesday, November 5 at 9 p.m. EST/8 p.m. CST. Tune in or stream on PBS, at pbs.org/frontline, or on the PBS Video App.
