A central tranche of AI in healthcare today has been in spotting signs of problems in medical imaging faster than humans currently can. The latest example of this comes via a new study from Google and Northwestern Medicine, which proposes to improve the detection of lung cancer using deep learning.
“Radiologists generally examine hundreds of two-dimensional images or ‘slices’ in a single CT scan, but this new machine learning system views the lungs in a huge, single three-dimensional image,” the researchers explain. “AI in 3D can be much more sensitive in its ability to detect early lung cancer than the human eye looking at 2-D images. This is technically ‘4D’ because it is not only looking at one CT scan, but two (the current and prior scan) over time.”