Jameel Clinic at MIT and King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre launch pioneering AI early breast cancer detection tool in Saudi Arabia

The Jameel Clinic, the epicentre of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSH&RC) have joined forces to roll out Mirai, a pioneering AI tool that can predict breast cancer up to five years earlier, and more accurately, than current mainstream screening techniques.

Introducing the tool for the first time in Saudi Arabia, the partnership between the MIT Jameel Clinic and KFSH&RC aims to deploy AI-enabled health technologies to help save lives and to revolutionise the landscape of healthcare in the country, especially in breast cancer care, for which the chances of treatment can double with early detection.

The Jameel Clinic, co-founded by MIT and Community Jameel in 2018, is collaborating with KFSH&RC to deploy other innovative AI tools, including for the prediction of lung cancer. These tools are undergoing tests on a wide range of patients, under the supervision of specialist doctors, to ensure that systematic health results are produced in a scientifically accurate manner.

A non-invasive, deep-learning algorithm that can predict breast cancer using only a patient’s mammogram, Mirai is equally effective across different races and ethnicities, which presents a major advance for health equity.

Mirai was trained on a dataset of over 200,000 exams from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and was validated on test sets from MGH, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan. Mirai is now installed at MGH and the team’s collaborators are actively working on integrating the model into clinical care.

In July 2023, the MIT Jameel Clinic and KFSH&RC announced a partnership aimed at advancing clinical AI research. The partnership seeks to enhance patient care, improve clinical outcomes and reduce healthcare costs through the development and implementation of advanced AI tools and solutions.