A safe replacement

According to a Cancer Research UK-funded study, computers could be used to safely replace a medical expert by interpreting a breast X-ray.

The study has shown that a single trained expert plus a computer is just as effective at detecting breast cancer as the two experts who traditionally read a mammogram in the UK.

But in the US and some other European countries only one expert reads mammograms. This means that single readers using the computer-aided detection programme (CAD) will be even more effective at detecting breast cancer.

Prof Fiona Gilbert of Aberdeen University and lead author of the study, said: ‘In the UK, this means that the same number of experts can read more mammograms in a given period of time.'

The study invited around 28,000 women to have their mammograms read both in the conventional way by two radiologists and also by a single radiologist using the computer.