On Jan. 2, 2025, an international study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that AI-based models can outperform human experts at identifying ovarian cancer in ultrasound images. The study was published in Nature Medicine.

The researchers have developed and validated neural network models able to differentiate between benign and malignant ovarian lesions, having trained and tested the AI on over 17,000 ultrasound images from 3,652 patients across 20 hospitals in eight countries. They then compared the models’ diagnostic capacity with a large group of experts and less experienced ultrasound examiners. 

The results showed that the AI models outperformed both expert and non-expert examiners at identifying ovarian cancer, achieving an accuracy rate of 86.3 percent, compared to 82.6 percent and 77.7 percent for the expert and non-expert examiners respectively.