The same technology that powers Siri and face recognition on your iPhone has also found success in medicine. By automatically analyzing microscopic images of breast tumor biopsies, artificial intelligence may one day help guide cancer treatments.
This particular type of AI is called deep learning, and over the last few years has become a part of our everyday lives. Its applications continue to expand to areas like language translation and self-driving cars, enabled by massive repositories of data. While deep learning was first applied to recognizing people, cars, and other everyday objects in photographs, it has more recently been adapted to study cancer. Our team of computer scientists and cancer researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used it to analyze types of breast cancer from microscopic images of tumor tissue.