Google has used its vast expertise in artificial intelligence to develop a new way of scanning X-rays to search for signs of breast cancer.

Axar.az reports citing Metro.co.uk that more than 55,000 women in the UK are diagnosed with breast cancer each year and Google reported in a blog post that its new system helped reduce false negatives by 1.2% and false positives by 2.7%.

The tech giant partnered with DeepMind, Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, Northwestern University, and the Royal Surrey County Hospital to develop the program. It looked at anonymous mammograms of more than 76,000 women from the UK and 15,000 women from the US to ‘train’ the artificial intelligence.

‘Reading these X-ray images is a difficult task, even for experts, and can often result in both false positives and false negatives,’ explained Shravya Shetty, the technical lead for Google Health and Daniel Tse, the product manager for Google Health in a blog post. ‘In turn, these inaccuracies can lead to delays in detection and treatment, unnecessary stress for patients and a higher workload for radiologists who are already in short supply. ‘Notably, when making its decisions, the model received less information than human experts did.’