A recent study published in the Journal of Healthcare Engineering used Artificial Intelligence algorithms to analyse ultrasound images for the diagnosis of breast cancer axillary lymph node metastasis.
Breast cancer is a disease in which the cells of the breast become malignant tumours due to mutations. These cancerous cells originate from either the lobules or the ductal cells of the breast and can grow out of control to form tumours.
After cancerous transformation of the breast cells, these cells break off from the original mass and enter the lymph nodes. Due to some complex immune reasons of our body, the cancer cells cannot be killed by the lymph nodes and survive within the lymph node, creating a “lymph node metastasis”. If lymph node metastasis occurs in superficial sites, they are easy to find and diagnose, however, if these metastases occur in some deeper lymph nodes they are much harder to find and diagnose.
For this study, 90 breast cancer patients with already known axillary lymph node metastasis were selected. These women were examined using an ultrasound and the data was analysed using an AI algorithm. It was found that the ultrasound diagnostic images processed using AI had a significantly higher accuracy at detecting deep lymph node metastasis than conventional methods.
The results of this study show that the artificial intelligence algorithm had excellent accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity in the diagnosis of breast cancer axillary lymph node metastasis.
Source: Zhang L, Jia Z, Leng X, Ma F. Artificial Intelligence Algorithm-Based Ultrasound Image Segmentation Technology in the Diagnosis of Breast Cancer Axillary Lymph Node Metastasis. J Healthc Eng. 2021;2021:8830260. Published 2021 Jul 22. Source link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8339348/
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