North East Scotland Breast Screening Programme

Using AI to improve accuracy and efficiency in breast screening

National Outcome: We are healthy and active

There is great interest in using AI to read mammograms in breast cancer screenings, support the work of radiologists and deliver better outcomes for women. Experts are keen to explore the potential for AI to further improve the already high standards of breast screening programmes in detecting cancers and turning around results more quickly.

The North East of Scotland Breast Screening Programme team is a partner in iCAIRD (Industrial Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research in Digital Diagnostics), one of five UK centres of excellence funded by Innovate UK.

A collaboration between Canon Medical Research Europe and the NHS Scotland has constructed a platform for safe and secure AI research within the University of Aberdeen’s Safe Haven. This has enabled Kheiron Medical to develop an AI programme that learns from four years of anonymised breast screening images, comprising over 80,000 sets of mammograms.

The project aims to establish how effectively the AI programme can augment human diagnosis, identify very small cancers that may be missed by human operators and reduce the number of women who are recalled because of equivocal results.

The Aberdeen team is now talking to patient groups across the country and developing plans to evaluate the AI programme more widely, prospectively across the Scottish Breast Screening Programme during 2021.