Why It’s So Hard to Use AI to Diagnose Cancer

January 21, 2025

image of colorectal cancer cells

(MIT Technology Review) – Visual analysis is something that AI has gotten quite good at since the first image recognition models began taking off nearly 15 years ago. Even though no model will be perfect, you can imagine a powerful algorithm someday catching something that a human pathologist missed, or at least speeding up the process of getting a diagnosis. We’re starting to see lots of new efforts to build such a model—at least seven attempts in the last year alone—but they all remain experimental.What will it take to make them good enough to be used in the real world?

Details about the latest effort to build such a model, led by the AI health company Aignostics with the Mayo Clinic, were published on arXiv earlier this month. The paper has not been peer-reviewed, but it reveals much about the challenges of bringing such a tool to real clinical settings. (Read More)