Dr. Regina Barzilay\u2019s world turned upside down when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014. <\/p>\n
It seemed to come out of nowhere. She didn\u2019t know anyone in her family who had BRCA genes \u2014 the genes normally associated with higher risks of developing breast and ovarian cancer \u2014 and she was living a healthy lifestyle.<\/p>\n
Barzilay said she wishes that she had had access to an artificial intelligence tool she later developed with Massachusetts Institute of Technology students called Mirai. The tool takes a mammogram and determines the likelihood of developing the disease in five years.<\/p>\n
Mirai, released in 2019, is among several AI tools Barzilay has helped to lead and develop that landed her in TIME Magazine\u2019s 2025 list of artificial intelligence leaders, innovators, shapers and thinkers, called TIME100 AI 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n Her artificial intelligence tool would\u2019ve predicted that she was high risk \u2014 and not only that, but would\u2019ve picked it up two years earlier than her doctors did, she said.<\/p>\n Read more: Trump says higher ed is too liberal. Tufts launched a center to tackle that issue<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cYou can see in 2013 and 2012, it was already there if you blow it up,\u201d Barzilay said, showing a MassLive reporter her previous mammograms.<\/p>\n The most common cancer in women worldwide is breast cancer, and half of breast cancers develop in those that don\u2019t have identifiable risk factors, other than gender and age, according to the World Health Organization<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really not a unique story. It happens to many, many women whose disease \u2014 even they go and do their mammograms quite regularly \u2014 it\u2019s just not diagnosed on time. So I think the technology can do a much better job than using our eyes,\u201d said Barzilay, who is a professor at MIT and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic.<\/p>\n Diagnosing breast cancer early not only makes it so treatment is less \u201cbrutal\u201d with fewer side effects like the loss of hair, but also increases a person\u2019s survival rate, she said.<\/p>\n What are the other tools she\u2019s developed?<\/p>\n Beyond Mirai, Barzilay has also worked on an AI model called Sybil, which predicts 6-year lung cancer risk from a patient\u2019s low-dose CT scan.<\/p>\n Lung cancer is the world\u2019s deadliest cancer. In 2023, 131,584 people in the U.S. died from lung cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a>.<\/p>\n Created in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, the tool was inspired by Barzilay\u2019s sister\u2019s friend, who was diagnosed with and died from lung cancer in her 50s despite being healthy and never having smoked. <\/p>\n \u201cShe started coughing [but] her doctor didn\u2019t identify that she may be at risk. So it took a very long time until they even sent her to do a simple X-ray,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was too late.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe tested it extensively on different populations and different races and ages and genders and are looking at safe clinical pipelines to bring it to the patients,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Sybil is being moved forward beyond just the U.S. \u2014 it is undergoing Taiwanese FDA approval due to the high rates of lung cancer there, Barzilay said.<\/p>\n She has also joined efforts with other educators and researchers, such as MIT professor Dr. Jim Collins, to create an AI model that screened over 100 million molecules to identify<\/a> the first AI-discovered antibiotic in 2020.<\/p>\n Read more: Huge gift to UMass Amherst a \u2018gamechanger\u2019 amid federal funding uncertainty<\/a><\/p>\n Much of the work that Barzilay has done has been focused on reducing uncertainty in the medical profession.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that whenever you\u2019re going to a doctor and if you really have a question, concern, during a checkup, we very soon realize how much uncertainty we have because the doctor can only predict what\u2019s going happen. But most of the time they would say we think this would happen, but we don\u2019t really know,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat AI is good at is actually taking whatever data we have and giving you likelihoods with probability, which gives you a way to reduce your uncertainty,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Addressing distrust in artificial intelligence<\/p>\n As AI has become more of a topic of discussion over the past few years with the proliferation of tools like ChatGPT, Barzilay said work needs to be done to improve people\u2019s trust in AI tools.<\/p>\n AI is not just ChatGPT, Barzilay said. AI tools in clinical care, in particular, are much more narrow \u2014 and they need to be clear and validated.<\/p>\n \u201cI am not saying that we should be blindly trusting to the technology, but I think that if technology is properly validated, FDA approved, properly incorporated into the clinical pipeline, then I think you should be able to trust it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n For example, Mirai has been validated in over 2 million mammograms in over 70 hospitals<\/a> and 22 countries and Sybil in 25 hospitals and 11 countries.<\/p>\n While medical professionals\u2019 errors can be common, many people still go to the doctor when something is wrong, Barzilay said.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you really trust that your blood sample, when you get blood was not contaminated? It would not even come to your mind. Why? Because you ensure all the processes are done correctly. So the question is, can we bring AI to the point, both informing the public and internally validating it properly so we start thinking about AI the same way as we think about any other medical test or device that we\u2019re using in patient care,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She said the use of AI in collaboration with doctors in the medical field, even if scary for some people, is the future.<\/p>\n \u201cTo me, the concern is not the fact whether it\u2019s going to make a mistake. To me, the concern is why in all the areas of our life we have AI and we trust it \u2014 to a degree, of course \u2014 but in the area which maybe matters the most, our health, we still don\u2019t have it. And to me this is the main concern,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Read more: A judge ruled Harvard should get its federal funding back. What happens next?<\/a><\/p>\n For Barzilay, the next step is to take the tools she\u2019s helped develop, including Mirai and Sybil, and bring them to the U.S. clinical setting.<\/p>\n However, the biggest challenge in getting these tools to patients isn\u2019t getting FDA approval \u2014 which still needs to be done \u2014 but in developing clinically approved protocols to determine what should happen after someone is determined to be high risk.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not enough just to predict the future. You should want to improve the future,\u201d Barzilay said.<\/p>\n If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement<\/a> and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and\/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Regina Barzilay\u2019s world turned upside down when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014. It seemed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-136863","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}