Artificial Intelligence, a widely debated topic with sides either rejoicing the benefits and endless possibilities it could mean for humanity or screaming out of fear for the destruction of all humanity- thanks Skynet. Whatever your feelings towards artificial intelligence may be, Google’s artificial intelligence team made a magnificent medical breakthrough! Researchers have developed a medical tool dubbed, LYNA (Lymph Node Assistant), which can detect metastases. Metastatic breast cancer is more advanced and can be very difficult for humans to find on their own.  For years, pathologists and medical professionals would have to examine slides by hand, but LYNA has been trained to detect metastases with ninety-nine percent accuracy, even when metastases extremely small which many humans would miss.

​

LYNA is not perfect- yet, failing to identify some germinal cancers and histiocytes, but still outperformed pathologists screening the same slides. Research shows that human pathologists miss a whopping sixty-two percent of micro-metastases when under time pressures.

​

LYNA and Google aren’t looking to replace pathologists, at least not yet, but they are working towards assisting pathologists to identify cancer. Not only has LYNA reduced the rate of missed micro-metastases by a factor of two but has also cut the inspection time for pathologists to just one minute. These impressive feats have only been lab tested and have not yet put into the field as metastases in breast cancer is usually late stage and incurable.  The researchers’ efforts are not fruitless as they plan on further training LYNA to be ready for real life clinical situations. Metastasis is common in many forms of cancer, researchers are hoping to teach LYNA to adapt and detect not only other forms of metastasis and cancers, but to find other tumors in general.

​

When LYNA finally launches for practical use, patients can be assured they will get more reliable diagnoses, hopefully faster as well since smaller tumors will be more likely to be found. Eventually LYNA could be saving lives. Other research teams within Google are also working on other artificial intelligence systems to further assist doctors. In June of 2018, Google’s Medical Brain team created an AI system capable of forecasting mortality rates with up to ninety percent accuracy. Another Google AI system, Verily has also been working towards determining a person’s risk of heart disease through retinal scan detection. Researchers across seventeen countries have also concluded that AI was far superior in detecting dangerous skin legions than dermatologists. AI is influencing the medical field more and more as human error seeks to be eliminated by scientists, and faster, more accurate results are being promised.