Identifying Dangerous Breast Cancer
A Focus on African American Women
Physicians may soon be able to order a highly accurate prognostic test that tells them whether newly diagnosed early breast cancers, such as Ductal Carcinoma in Situ, are aggressive, helping them design the most appropriate care plan for each woman. Importantly, the prognostic test is equally accurate at evaluating samples from Caucasian and African American women.
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The identification of recurrent (or aggressive) cancer lesions is especially important for Black women because they have a higher incidence of triple negative breast cancer, an especially aggressive form of breast cancer. Thus, the lack of an accurate prognostic test for breast cancer recurrences is very burdensome for black women.
Unfortunately, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that Black women are severely under-represented in clinical trials making up less than 5% of the women in trials.
In developing next generation ML/AI tests, underrepresented classes pose a great problem because outcome-relevant image features may be missed or irrelevant features confused with outcome-relevant image features.
Predictoma has developed a prognostic test to identify ductal carcinoma in situ of the breast lesions that will recur and those that will not. The test is based upon the expression and mobilization of specific glycolytic components, which contribute to aggressiveness.
To develop our classifier, black women accounted for about 49% of training dataset. In so doing, Predictoma developed a protocol and tools to detect aggressive cells that contribute to breast cancer recurrences in such a way that Black women fully benefit from these new tools.
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