TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Computers Equal Humans In Breast Cancer Detection

ADVERTISEMENT

The Associated Press

Published: October 2, 2008

NEW YORK - A computer is as good as a second pair of eyes for helping a radiologist spot breast cancer on a mammogram, one of the largest and most rigorous tests of computer-aided detection found.

Like spell-checkers looking for mistakes, the computers flag suspicious areas on X-rays for a closer look by a radiologist. Mammograms are used to screen women for early signs of breast cancer but the tests aren't perfect. In the United States, the X-rays are read by a single radiologist and cancers are sometimes missed.

Computer-aided detection, or CAD, was developed to help radiologists pick up more cancers. Approved a decade ago, these computer programs are now used for about a third of the nation's mammograms. But the value and accuracy of the technology has continued to be debated.

Now, British researchers are reporting results from a randomized study of 31,000 women. Mammograms in Britain are routinely checked by two radiologists or technicians, which is thought to be better than a single review. Researchers wanted to know whether a single expert aided by a computer could do as well as two pairs of eyes.

They found that computer-aided detection spotted nearly the same number of cancers, 198 out of 227, compared with 199 for the two readers.

In places such as the United States, "Where single reading is standard practice, computer-aided detection has the potential to improve cancer-detection rates to the level achieved by double reading," the researchers said. Their findings were published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study was done at three centers in England that do a large number of routine mammograms. Most of the women in the study were assigned to have their mammograms reviewed twice - once by a pair of experts and a second time by a single reviewer aided by a computer.

"What we demonstrated was that one reader using CAD could pick up as many cancers as the two readers could," said radiologist Fiona J. Gilbert of the University of Aberdeen, lead author of the study.

The new findings are encouraging, said Carol H. Lee, a radiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

"In the United States, it's just not practical in most practices to do double readings by physicians," Lee said.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT