DeepMind expands AI cancer research program to Japan
DeepMind is furthering its cancer research efforts with a newly announced partnership. Today, the London-based Google subsidiary said it has been given access to mammograms from roughly 30,000 women that were taken at Jikei University Hospital in Tokyo, Japan between 2007 and 2018. It'll use that data to refine its artificially intelligent (AI) breast cancer detection algorithms. Over the course of the next five years, DeepMind researchers will review the 30,000 images, along with 3,500 images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and historical mammograms provided by the U.K.'s Optimam (an image database of over 80,000 scans extracted from the NHS' National Breast Screening System), to investigate whether its AI systems can accurately spot signs of cancerous tissue. The collaboration builds on DeepMind's work with the Cancer Research UK Imperial Center at Imperial College London, where it has already analyzed roughly 7,500 mammograms.