Helen Frazer and AI in the City of Angels

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the way medical images are read and the future role of the radiologist. And one way that the College recognises this is through its support of the 2022 Bill Hare Fellow, Adjunct Associate Professor Helen Frazer, a trailblazer in AI.

Adj A/Prof Frazer is Clinical Director of St Vincent’s BreastScreen and BreastScreen Victoria. She has dedicated herself for more than twenty years to breast cancer screening, imaging and diagnosis, working in and leading screening services across three Australian states.

Her current research focuses on the use of deep learning AI for breast cancer detection with mammography; ethical, legal, and social implications of AI in health care; user experience and workflow studies in cancer screening; and health workforce preparation for AI tools. Helen leads the BRAIx AI research program which was awarded a Medical Research Future Fund grant to translate promising AI mammography image reading results into breast cancer screening.

We are now working in real-world scenarios to see how well an algorithm can determine if cancer is present on the image,” Dr Frazer said. “That’s a screening population with a very low prevalence of breast cancer compared to a cancer-enriched training set. The algorithm is performing very strongly. It’s early days, and there are some big challenges, but it’s really exciting. There is so much promise to transform breast cancer screening with artificial intelligence and improve health care.

Adj A/Prof Frazer, who has been a FRANZCR since 1999, is a member of the College’s Breast Imaging Advisory Committee and Artificial Intelligence Group. Among her accolades is the prestigious Women in AI 2022 Innovator of the Year.

She was awarded a RANZCR Clinical Radiology Research Grant in 2020, to test her hypothesis that AI in screening mammography services can prevent women dying from breast cancer in a way that improves detection, lowers harms, reduces costs, causes less stress and can be quickly put into practice. This study demonstrated a significant opportunity to boost the performance of such techniques.

In 2022 Adj A/Prof Frazer was awarded the RANZCR Bill Hare Fellowship, which allowed her the opportunity of taking up an Honorary Visiting Scholarship at the worldleading centre of excellence, the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Medicine and Imaging (AIMI) in San Francisco. The Fellowship allowed her to expand her study in the development and deployment of AI solutions, cooperating and learning from globally renowned experts in the examination of leading-edge data curation and AI model use in screening and diagnosis. She looks forward to sharing her knowledge and insights to the FRANZCR community, to support the broader considerations and applications of AI in radiology. Ultimately, the use of AI in breast cancer screening aims to increase the accuracy of breast cancer detection, improve the experience of clients and clinicians, and lower screening costs.

While she was working in San Francisco, Adj A/Prof Frazer joined the College’s Growing Grant Success session at the 2022 ASM. There she spoke on her work for which she received College research funding, on transforming breast cancer screening with AI.

And in December 2022, Adj A/Prof Frazer presented her work on AI readers at an AIMI Research Meeting. Her study demonstrated that human-AI collaboration has potential to improve accuracy and lower radiologist workload and costs in real world screening programs.

The Bill Hare Fellowship supports a Fellow more than five years post-Fellowship for a period of intensive or overseas study, or for attendance at an international short course, with a grant of AU$30,000.

If you would like to apply for the Bill Hare Fellowship, or any of our research grants or awards, the College is now inviting applications for 2023.

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