Professor Hutan Ashrafian, chief medical officer at Harbinger Health (Credit: Flagship Pioneering)
A large NHS study on the use of AI in breast cancer screening found that Google AI was better at detecting cases of breast cancer than human doctors.
In the UK, breast cancer scans are assessed by two readers, usually specialist radiologists. Each reads the scan separately, with the second reader either knowing or not knowing the first reader’s decision.
The research, published in two linked papers in Nature Cancer, on 10 March 2026, looked at how two human readers compared to one human reader plus one AI reader, using AI software developed by Google.
In a review of the mammograms of 125,000 women, the AI system detected more cases of invasive cancer, more cases overall, had fewer false positives, and recalled fewer women having their first scan than humans did.
Dr Hutan Ashrafian, chief medical officer at Harbinger Health, part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and author on both papers, said: “This is the closest AI has ever come to helping reduce breast cancer deaths within the NHS.
“The potential for the NHS to take this forward is significant, particularly in light of the National Cancer Plan for England’s recognition that ‘there are few clearer signs of the failure of the status quo than our inadequate cancer outcomes’ and its appetite to embrace new technologies to address that.”
The study also found that the AI identified 25% of ‘interval cancers’ which are diagnosed between routine screening rounds after an earlier scan came up clear.
In the second part of the research, which looked at 9,266 current cases at two screening services at 12 sites in London, AI reduced the time spent reading scans by almost a third.
The average time for AI to complete a reading was 17.7 minutes compared to 2.08 days for the first human reader.
Building trust through human-AI collaboration
While AI-assisted screening works in theory, the test of its value lies in how medical professionals respond to AI-driven diagnoses in practice.
The final part of the study looked at the use of AI in arbitration, which is when the first and second readers don’t agree on the diagnosis and a third reader analyses the scan to make a final decision.
The third expert needed to be called in more to adjudicate between the AI and the human than it did when both the radiologists were humans. In the two centres studied, the number of arbitrations rose by 142% and 22%.
Although AI had a higher arbitration rate, it reduced the overall screening workload, meaning that when the human-AI team was compared with a human-human pair, the results were roughly equal.
Even with this increase in arbitration, the researchers suggest that further development of the AI tool could lead to earlier detection of cancers.
The work was supported by the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre and funded through the NHS AI in Health and Care Award in partnership with the NIHR.
Dr Ashrafian is a keynote speaker at Digital Health Rewired 2026, which takes place on 24-25 March at the Birmingham NEC. Register here.
The post Google AI outperforms human doctors in detecting breast cancer first appeared on TechToday.
This post originally appeared on TechToday.