Applying machine learning to mammography screening for breast cancer

We founded DeepMind Health to develop technologies that could help address some of societys toughest challenges. So were very excited to announce that our latest research partnership will focus on breast cancer.Well be working with a group of leading research institutions, led by the Cancer Research UK Centre at Imperial College London, and alongside the AI health research team at Google, to determine if cutting-edge machine learning technology could help improve the detection of breast cancer.Breast cancer is a significant global health problem. Every single year, over 1.6 million people are diagnosed with the disease, and while advances in early detection and treatment have improved survival rates, breast cancer still claims the lives of 500,000 people around the world every year, around 11,000 of whom are here in the UK.Thats partly because accurately detecting and diagnosing breast cancer still remains a huge challenge.Currently, clinicians use mammograms (an X-ray of the breasts) to spot cancers early and determine the correct treatment, but this process is far from perfect. Thousands of cancer cases are not picked up by mammograms every year, including around 30% of interval cancers, which are cancers that are diagnosed between screenings.