What radiologists can do, this computer programme can do better. A computer programme designed to identify breast cancer from routine scans with accuracy level greater or equal to a radiologist. Researchers call this innovation a breakthrough in the fight against the global killer.

According to researchers from Google and medic enters in the US and Britain, announced the invention in the journal ‘Nature’.

Interpretation of scans by doctors has its limitation. Sometimes the mammograms either return a false positive – misdiagnosing a healthy patient as having cancer - or false negative – missing the disease as it spreads. This new system for reading mammograms is still being evaluated and studied, and is therefore not yet available for common use.

The authors from Nature used mammograms from about 76,000 women in Britain and 15,000 in USA, whose diagnosis were already known, to train computers to recognise cancer.

In another test, the researchers pitted the computer programme against six radiologists, presenting 500 mammograms to be interpreted. Overall, the computers outperformed the radiologists.