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Episode 1: An AI tool boosts breast cancer detection accuracy

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Breast cancer is the most-common invasive cancer among women. It affects 14% of women worldwide and every year, over half a million women die of it. That makes breast cancer one of the largest medical problems faced today.

Taking treatment decisions and curing this disease requires, at first place, diagnosing it.

However, due to time constraints and the existence of very small metastases on individual slides, human pathologists sometimes fail to detect cancerous cells: they miss about 20% of breast cancers in mammograms, even in countries where screening mammograms are reviewed by two radiologists.

In thelast years, the introduction of deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in medical image analysis has prevaded the field of automated breast cancer detection in digital mammography.

Researchers have created an AI diagnostic tool that helps doctors detect breast cancer.

The man-made neural network is trained with more than a million mammography images, and the program is getting “smarter” as it reviews more and more data.

The AI tool was taught to analyze even the small patches, spot changes that are invisible to the human, and then make a map of the areas that are most at risk.

In addition to its success in the detection of abnormality as well as an average radiologist, this AI invention has won two main challenges concerning the efficiency and consistence of the results: Reducing false negatives by 9% and false positives by 5.7%.

At this level, you might be asking yourself whether or not this program will replace doctors when it comes to detecting breast cancer. The answer is definitely a NO!

In fact, the knowledge we’re getting when the program points out cancer to us, is the knowledge of many pathologists who contributed to training the machine on a model. It’s mainly human knowledge.

All we said above, highlights the fact that we must combine the strengths of human radiologists with the results of these performing systems in order to provide the most accurate diagnosis for the patient and thus allow clinicians to have significantly more time to deal with curing him.

“AI detected pixel-level changes in tissue invisible to the human eye, while humans used forms of reasoning not available to AI,” says senior study author Krzysztof J. Geras, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Radiology at NYU Langone and an affiliated faculty member at the NYU Center for Data Science. “The ultimate goal of our work is to augment, not replace, human radiologists.”

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Chapter 2 : England, the Discovery of Vaccines.

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Fast breathing, clenched fists, and hunched shoulders are common signs of tension that most people show as the vaccination syringe approaches the body whilst 300 years ago people took the same syringe with great joy and hope.
The reason is that we are clueless of what humanity endured before the « blessing » of vaccines came to light.
Let me tell you the tale of one of humankind’s greatest inventions through the eyes of a time walker. This invention actually underwent a lengthy process of discovery, development, and improvement that lasted for centuries.

And our wanderer walked down the lane of the 1700s, when English physician Edward Jenner overheard a girl boasting to her friend that she would not contract smallpox because she had already contracted cowpox and she will have a flawless face free from pox blisters.

The doctor thought that the idea was brilliant even though it seemed silly.
Why not provide cowpox vaccination instead of the usual inoculation which involved inserting fresh smallpox material, such as blisters from a sick individual, under the skin of a nonimmune person considering that 3 percent of people died due to variolation using the previous method?
Smallpox and cowpox both belong to the same family « poxviridae » and once the disease is transferred from cows to people, it became weakened
In order to give the immune system the memory it needs to fight smallpox once it enters the body, the doctor came up with the brilliant idea of infecting his patients with cowpox, which is contagious but much less dangerous than what smallpox can do to a human. He called this procedure « the variolae vaccine » and performed it on a boy for the first time. In 1796, at that same time, the idea of a modern vaccination was born. The boy lived and showed no signs of smallpox. And Edward Jenner branded himself as « the father of immunology » in history.
From that time until 1850, vaccination evolved, and then the arm-to-arm vaccination practice emerged, posing a safety concern because this new method of immunization allows for the transmission of bacteria and other diseases from one person to another.
Sydney Cooper, a microbiologist, discovered in 1896 that adding glycerin to the blistering agent used during the procedure could make this vaccination safer.
As a result, scientists were able to create the vaccine « dryvax, » which was used in the 1967 big WHO vaccination campaign that was a complete success.
The smallpox was eradicated, and research continued in the years that followed to reduce the vaccine’s side effects and make it more effective.
With knowledge, observation, try and error as well as the absurd notion of a normal girl, which we can term « luck » and the culminated work of many minds, many hands, many hearts during hundreds of years, this holly tool of science was created.
People like us who were born in an era where a new vaccine could be developed in one or one and a half year to stop a worldwide pandemic are unable to appreciate the blessing that this discovery brought to the world.

One of the deadliest diseases in human history, smallpox is believed to have killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history with a death rate of 30%, compared to coronavirus’s 3%, just to imagine the nightmare it caused to humanity; the battle that humans won against it is one of history’s greatest victories.
Granted with hardiness and protection, waiting for the secret work of a needle in their bodies, with calm breaths and relaxed shoulders people received their vaccine.
May humanity always strive in preserving a world rich of life and vitality.

Written By : Nada Arfaoui.

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