October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Women over 40 are encouraged to get annual mammograms because early detection is key to beating breast cancer. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used in many health settings to help determine the results of breast cancer screenings, but is it effective?
UC Davis Health will help answer that question. It is co-leading a newly funded national clinical trial to evaluate whether AI can help radiologists interpret screening mammograms more accurately.
The goal is to improve breast cancer detection and reduce unnecessary callbacks and anxiety for patients.
The study, known as the PRISM trial (Pragmatic Randomized Trial of Artificial Intelligence for Screening Mammography), is supported by a $16 million award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
The study will involve hundreds of thousands of mammograms interpreted at academic medical centers and breast imaging facilities in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Washington and Wisconsin.
"PRISM is the first large-scale randomized trial in the U.S. to evaluate the effectiveness of AI in breast cancer screening interpretation," said Diana Miglioretti, dual principal investigator and lead of the study's data coordinating center, which will be based at UC Davis Health.
Miglioretti is professor and division chief of Biostatistics at the UC Davis Department of Public Health Sciences and co-leads the Population Sciences and Cancer Control program at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center.
"We're rigorously evaluating whether AI-assisted interpretation improves screening outcomes," she said. "The goal is not to replace radiologists with AI but to see how effective AI could be as a co-pilot in reading mammography."
