A biopsy that turns out to have benign results can be a relief. But in some cases, it could also mean a patient whose risk of cancer was low from the start has gone through an unnecessarily invasive procedure.
By and large, radiologists recommend that patients whose breast MRI scans raise suspicion of a cancerous growth get a biopsy done. But MRIs often pick up on benign lesions that other mammograms and ultrasound may not. This leads to some patients having their lesions falsely classified as higher risk than they are, and undergoing a biopsy.
In these cases, “radiologists don’t have enough certainty to make a very well-informed decision, should this patient actually undergo a biopsy or not. So they err on the side of, let’s just biopsy a lot of people,” said Jan Witowski, a postdoctoral research fellow at New York University Langone Health. “This is where the hope of using AI tools is.”
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