BOSTON — Every year, more than 350,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer, according to the American Cancer Society, making it the most common cancer in women.
A local doctor is working to bring down those numbers with a new AI company that analyzes women’s mammograms—identifying their cancer risk—before they are even diagnosed.
Dr. Connie Lehman is the professor of radiology at Harvard and is also the founder and CEO of Clairity, a Boston-based AI software company that analyzes mammograms and a woman’s risk of getting cancer in the next five years.
“I realized that, again and again, women were so shocked when they received their breast cancer diagnosis,” said Dr. Connie Lehman. “A very common response was, ' How can this be? No one in my family has ever had breast cancer.”
Dr. Lehman says the medical community has made so many advances about the importance of knowing family history, but there is still a gap in trying to identify women who are diagnosed when they don’t have a known genetic mutation.
“And that’s where I realized maybe we could leverage the power of AI to extract predictive data from the mammogram to help identify these women missing a family but are at risk of breast cancer,” said Dr. Lehman.
For the past ten years, Dr. Lehman worked with a researcher at MIT to develop an AI research tool to help predict a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer from her mammogram, using hundreds of thousands of mammograms with known five-year outcomes, to detect future risk levels.
“When a woman has her clarity breast score calculated, she’s given a number; it’s a percentage,” explained Dr. Lehman.
The Clairity program produces a five-year breast cancer risk score based on the patient’s mammogram and goes a step further by finding a way to reduce their chances of getting the disease.
“And that’s a very exciting area that we’ve moved into to focus more on preventing the disease from developing rather than just waiting for it to develop and then reacting to it once it’s there,” said Dr. Lehman.
It’s a more personalized approach that provides each patient with more information to determine what is the best way to mitigate her risk and have a strategy for early detection.
“What would be the threshold that might make them consider doing something like chemo prevention, or maybe it’s just slightly elevated and they say, you know what, this is the incentive I need to really kick up my exercise program so that my risk comes down and I don’t have to take chemo-prevention,” said Dr. Elizabeth Mittendorf.
Dr. Mittendorf is the Chief of the Division of Breast Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She says in a time where there is a shortage of breast imagers, the risk score could determine how often a patient needs to get their mammogram.
“It would have to be something that we would investigate, but I do think that likely, because if your risk is less than one percent in five years, getting a mammogram 12 months from now may not actually be necessary,” said Dr. Mittendorf.
Dr. Lehman is proud to introduce this technology at a time when more women are making an impact in the field of science.
“Often if we were to close our eyes and imagine someone working in ai or computer science picture a man,” said Dr. Lehman. “I’m really excited for more women, especially younger women, thinking about the impact they want to have on the world.”
The Clairity program was first introduced at Beth Isreal in February--and will roll out in other hospitals in Massachusetts. It will then be expanding to provide more access to women across the country.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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