St Vincent’s Melbourne in AI breast cancer breakthrough

St Vincent’s BreastScreen Melbourne is at the forefront of a major breakthrough in breast cancer detection, thanks to an Australian‑made artificial intelligence tool that is transforming how clinicians identify risk in women who receive normal mammogram results.

Trained on hundreds of thousands of mammograms, the AI tool can estimate a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer more accurately than other methods doctors rely on, such as age and family history.

The BRAIx algorithm can detect subtle imaging signals invisible to the human eye and generate a personalised risk score that predicts a woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer over the next four years.

Some 90,000 Australian women are forecast to die from breast cancer in the next 25 years.

A/Prof Helen Frazer and her team at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne are opening the door to a national AI-supported breast screening program that can set a baseline screen for all Australian women at age 40 or even younger, and is personalised to their future risk, not their age.

The research has received global attention after being published in The Lancet Digital Health this month.

Researchers from St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research, BreastScreen Australia, The University of Adelaide and The University of Melbourne collaborated on the tool, which received $5 million from the federal government’s Medical Research Future Fund.

Read the ABC’s coverage here

St Vincent’s Health Australia is a CHA Member