October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just for nerds anymore. It’s changing the way we approach breast cancer, from predicting who’s at risk to detecting disease earlier to personalizing treatment. By reviewing images with incredible precision and processing vast amounts of patient data, AI can aid in estimating disease risk, guide diagnoses and suggest which treatments might work best. For breast cancer, that means the right test or therapy at the right time, leading to better outcomes and less unnecessary treatment.
There are free breast cancer risk assessment tools available online, which many women find helpful, and that clinicians also use. The Brem Foundation’s CheckMate calculator and the Gail model offered through the Susan G. Komen website are both widely respected and easy to access online.
These questionnaires use personal and family history, along with other risk factors, to estimate a woman’s chances of developing breast cancer. These tools rely on traditional statistics. Their equations are based on established formulas that don’t change the more that you use the tool. That’s where AI-based models come in. Since they get smarter every time someone uses them, they can offer a more advanced way to assess risk by analyzing larger and more diverse data sets.
