Artificial Intelligence: Is It Armageddon for Breast Radiologists?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken radiology by storm, in particular, mammogram interpretation, and we have seen a recent surge in the number of publications on potential uses of AI in breast radiology. Breast cancer exerts a lot of burden on the National Health Service (NHS) and is the second most common cancer in the UK as of 2018. New cases of breast cancer have been on the rise in the past decade, while the survival rate has been improving. The NHS breast cancer screening program led to an improvement in survival rate. The expansion of the screening program led to more mammograms, thereby putting more work on the hands of radiologists, and the issue of double reading further worsens the workload. The introduction of computer-aided detection (CAD) systems to help radiologists was found not to have the expected outcome of improving the performance of readers. Unreliability of CAD systems has led to the explosion of studies and development of applications with the potential use in breast imaging. The purported success recorded with the use of machine learning in breast radiology has led to people postulating ideas that AI will replace breast radiologists. Of course, AI has many applications and potential uses in radiology, but will it replace radiologists? We reviewed many articles on the use of AI in breast radiology to give future radiologists and radiologists full information on this topic. This article focuses on explaining the basic principles and terminology of AI in radiology, potential uses, and limitations of AI in radiology. We have also analysed articles and answered the question of whether AI will replace radiologists.