When you’re a journalist, potential sources are everywhere, even at a medical appointment. When I had my annual mammogram in May, radiologist Pouneh Razavi said all looked well. Then she said: “And we used AI!”
We here at Science News had been talking about medical uses of AI, so I had to find out what was up. It turns out that Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine, had started using artificial intelligence to help read mammograms just two months before. Razavi, who is director of breast imaging in the National Capital Region, Johns Hopkins, told me that my scan and others would be used to train algorithms, with the goal of giving more information to physicians and making diagnoses more accurate.