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AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

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Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#51

Post by nottorp »

sfink wrote: post #22

The title bothers me. It suggests to me that "AI" is a single thing. If two guys are tested and turn out to be not that great at reading MRI images, should the headline be "Male radiologists miss nearly one-third of breast cancers"? If it said "AI something ", I'd be fine with it. It's a statement about that something, not about AI in general. Use it as an adjective (short for "AI-using" I guess?), not a noun.

> It suggests to me that "AI" is a single thing.

But it is. It's LLMs. There is no other "AI".

Haven't you read HN in the past 1-2 years?

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#52

Post by ako »

boxed wrote: post #18
levocardia wrote: post #5

The original study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11547-025-02161-1 It was retrospective-only, i.e. a case series on women who were known to have breast cancer, so there were zero false negatives and zero true negatives, because all patients in the study truly had cancer. The AI system used was a ConvNet used commercially circa 2021, which is when the data for this case series were collected.

I believe there's a big issue in the US of over-diagnosing breast cancer too. "Known to have breast cancer" might not be so clear cut.

That statement would benefit from a link to your source.

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#54

Post by joelthelion »

nephihaha wrote: post #49
joelthelion wrote: post #37

"AI" doesn't exist. There are probably hundreds of different breast cancer detection algorithms. Maybe the SOTA isn't good enough yet. That doesn't mean AI in general is fundamentally incapable of correctly detecting it.

It is a useful umbrella term for all the systems in question.

It seems this study tested a single one of them.

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#55

Post by _heimdall »

directevolve wrote: post #26

The point of this study is that it suggests that fully AI-automated mammography can currently deliver 70% sensitivity in detecting breast cancer using this model. It does not enable us to compare AI to unaided human performance. As this study did not include healthy controls, there is no false positive rate. The false positive rate is a crucial missing metric, since the vast majority of women do not have breast cance…

Its interesting to see this valid argument raised against this use of AI to identify breast cancer. The lack of control groups is one of the more common concerns raised related to vaccines as well, the argument lands like a lead balloon there.

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#56

Post by nephihaha »

joelthelion wrote: post #54
nephihaha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a useful umbrella term for all the systems in question.

It seems this study tested a single one of them.

These reports often misrepresent scientific data, I think that's a given.

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#57

Post by lambdaone »

shevy-java wrote: post #46
ForHackernews wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are confused and think the Bitter Lesson is that you can just feed up a bigger and bigger model and eventually it becomes omnipotent.

They promised us that AI was The Solution. Now they have to deliver. If the TechBros fail us here, we may then assume they may fail us everywhere else as well.

And we'd be wrong about that. Different domains are showing wildly different characteristics, with some ML models showing superhuman or expert level performance in some domains (chess, face and handwriting recognition for example) and promising but as yet just not good enough in other domains (radiography, self-driving cars, question answering, prose writing). Currently coding is somewhere in the middle; superhuman in some ways, disappointingly unusable in others.

I don't we can make any conclusive verdict about the promise of ML for radiography right now; the life-critical nature of the application it's in the unusable middle, but it might get better in a few years or it might not. Time will tell.

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#58

Post by dgacmu »

_heimdall wrote: post #55
directevolve wrote: post #26

The point of this study is that it suggests that fully AI-automated mammography can currently deliver 70% sensitivity in detecting breast cancer using this model. It does not enable us to compare AI to unaided human performance. As this study did not include healthy controls, there is no false positive rate. The false positive rate is a crucial missing metric, since the vast majority of women do not have breast cance…

Its interesting to see this valid argument raised against this use of AI to identify breast cancer. The lack of control groups is one of the more common concerns raised related to vaccines as well, the argument lands like a lead balloon there.

Because it's generally unethical to not give someone a treatment known already to be safe and effective. Studies of new vaccines where there is not an existing vaccine _do_ use placebo controls. Heck, my son got placebo during moderna's pediatric covid vaccine trial (to our frustration. grin.)

Subsequent trials generally compare against the best known current treatment as the control instead.

This study has no such concerns. It's ethical to include images of non-cancerous breast tissue. The things are not comparable.

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#59

Post by pcthrowaway »

melagonster wrote: post #34
sfink wrote: post #22

The title bothers me. It suggests to me that "AI" is a single thing. If two guys are tested and turn out to be not that great at reading MRI images, should the headline be "Male radiologists miss nearly one-third of breast cancers"? If it said "AI something ", I'd be fine with it. It's a statement about that something, not about AI in general. Use it as an adjective (short for "AI-using" I guess?), not a noun.

They will directly write that "Radiologists miss nearly one-third of breast cancers." I trust the meaning of this article is just that it requires hospitals to rethink their decision to substitute all doctors today.

If they test someone with no background in radiology, they could even make the headline "Humans miss 50% of breast cancers"

Re: AI misses nearly one-third of breast cancers, study finds

#60

Post by nabla9 »

directevolve wrote: post #26

The point of this study is that it suggests that fully AI-automated mammography can currently deliver 70% sensitivity in detecting breast cancer using this model. It does not enable us to compare AI to unaided human performance. As this study did not include healthy controls, there is no false positive rate. The false positive rate is a crucial missing metric, since the vast majority of women do not have breast cance…

As it was retrospective study, I really hope they made sure that test images were not in a training set of the algorithm. If they were, the whole study is meaningless.
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