Breast cancer: The importance of early detection

Time and again, healthcare providers emphasize the importance of detecting breast cancer at the earliest stage of the condition. Often the disease is detected after symptoms appear, while many women with breast cancer actually have no symptoms. This makes regular screening so important.

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There are several risk factors for breast cancer, regardless if many cases cannot be pinned down to a specific cause. A woman’s risk increases with age, as almost 80 percent of breast cancers are found in women age 50 and above. There’s also personal history, family history, and genetic factors to consider. Childbearing can also be a risk factor – the older a woman is when she has her first child, the greater her risk. 

These risk factors highlight the fact that early detection can go a long way in saving lives. Current recommended screening guidelines promote mammography, a breast X-ray that can detect breast cancer up to two years before the tumor can be felt by the patient or the doctor. Women ages 40 to 45 or older and are at average breast cancer risk are recommended to have a mammogram once every year. 

Regular breast self-exam is another option for early detection. This is recommended to be done at least once a month, as 40 percent of diagnosed cases are actually detected by women who feel a lump. It also helps one become familiar with how her breasts look and feel, making it easier to detect abnormalities. 

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Matias Campiani is the co-founder and CEO of Welwaze Medical, Inc., a health tech company dedicated to the development of application-centric software solutions tied to sensors that allow users to monitor their health. The first application is focusing on a revolutionary new product that allows early breast cancer detection. Learn more on this page.

Breast Cancer In Men: Causes And Symptoms

Breast cancer rarely occurs in men, accounting for only around 1 percent of all breast cancer cases. But it’s not one to be completely ignored—there are signs and symptoms that one should heed, and causes and predispositions to identify.

Image source: BreastCancerNow.org  

Men do have a small amount of breast tissue, similar to the breasts of girls prior to puberty. This tissue doesn’t develop and grow in men, but due to its nature it can still develop breast cancer. It’s rare for men under 35 years old to get breast cancer, as the risk goes up with age and most cases occur between ages 60 and 70.

Breast cancer risk in males is aggravated by different factors, such as elevated estrogen levels, prior exposure to radiation, and a family history of the illness. Mutations in certain genes, such as BRCA2 mutations, are also linked with an increased risk for male breast cancer. BRCA1 mutations, however, are thought to play a smaller role in male cases than in female cases.

The symptoms in men are similar to those in women, with most cases diagnosed upon the discovery of a lump on the chest. Unlike women, though, men tend to delay doctor’s consultation until more severe symptoms such as nipple bleeding occur.

It’s important to differentiate between breast cancer and benign breast conditions, such as gynecomastia or an increase in the amount of male breast tissue. Benign breast tumors are also abnormal lumps or masses of tissue that aren’t cancerous in nature.

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Matias Campiani was a founding partner in several companies and presently is Co-Founder and CEO of Welzwaze Medical, which focuses on the development of AI-based diagnostic and health monitoring solutions, with an emphasis on early breast cancer detection. Learn more about health technologies on this page.

The Promising Health Applications Of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) - along with its associated concepts like deep learning, machine learning, and the dizzying concept of robots at work – is changing healthcare in unprecedented ways. Today, it assists in accurate medical diagnosis without a doctor’s help and in predicting patterns of illness among common groups of people even before the onset of disease. Here are some specific ways that AI is changing the healthcare worldwide.

Digital consultation

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AI-powered apps are providing medical consultation based on individual medical history as well as common medical knowledge. Users will report symptoms, enter them into the app, and the app in turn will use speech recognition to compare against a set database of diseases. Recommendations for next patient action are also offered.

Controlling antibiotic resistance

Antibiotic resistance or the spread of superbugs is a growing threat to global populations, damaging the hospital setting and killing thousands annually. Electronic health record data can help identify infection patterns and highlight people at risk before symptoms surface. AI and machine learning can be leveraged to drive these analytics for greater accuracy and speedy health alerts.

Medical data management

In healthcare, the first step is to compile and analyze data using medical records and history. AI improves data management through automation and robots collecting, storing, re-formatting, and tracing data for easier and consistent access.

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Advancing immunotherapy for cancer treatment

Immunotherapy harnesses one’s own immune system to attack a malignancy, improving the fight against persistent tumors. Machine learning algorithms and their expert synthesis of very complex datasets can assist in therapies most suitable to a patient’s unique genetic makeup.

Matias Campiani is the co-founder and CEO of Welwaze Medical, Inc., a health tech company dedicated to the development of application-centric software solutions tied to health-monitoring sensors. Learn more about healthcare trends on this page.

How Artificial Intelligence Is Joining The Fight Against Cancer

Artificial intelligence is speeding up the search for a cancer cure. For the past few years, AI has already delivered advancements and breakthroughs in the healthcare industry with regard to diagnosis and treatments, yet even those who advocate for its full use believe a cure is still a decade away.

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The path toward a cancer-free world is built on small steps and will be iterative. Just as how previous innovations has led researchers to develop present cutting-edge technologies, AI-assisted cancer cure may take a little more time to materialize. While AI is currently fulfilling breakthroughs in cancer diagnosis, its technology will have to undergo manifold iterations to solve an overabundance of smaller problems before undertaking the final challenge.

AI possesses the huge potential of helping scientists manage the puzzling difficulties of research and other data to accelerate the discovery of a cancer drug and render scientific findings into real benefits for patients. With the ability to search through billions of experimental results, AI can identify patterns and make functional predictions regarding diagnoses, end results, and responses to treatments.

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Scientists are priming AI systems to determine early evidence of cancer in patients. This technology can be considered as seeds, but scientists, researchers, and physicians believe that it can go as far as assisting humans in finding a cure for the disease that kills millions every year. AI is a powerful weapon in mankind’s battle against cancer and other diseases, requiring the participation of providers and users in its iterative process.

Matias Campiani is the co-founder and CEO of Welwaze Medical, Inc., a health tech company that focuses on AI-based diagnostic and health monitoring solutions. Subscribe to this blog for similar updates.

How High-Tech Tech Tools Improve Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Abu Qader, a Cornell University freshman, once had a family trip to Afghanistan and saw that the country’s medical care needs attention. He knew and saw people and relatives there fall ill with breast cancer, left undetected and putting their lives in danger. The medical technology company he co-founded now seeks to address gaps in breast cancer treatment through technology.

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Many high-tech companies are now vying for attention and pouring investments in this space of medical diagnostics. Mammograms remain the most important diagnostic tool for breast cancer, where suspicious lesions will be tested with a needle biopsy. If the biopsy detects an abnormality, the patient will undergo surgery to remove the lesion. About 90 percent of the time, however, the lesions are found to be benign, rendering the procedure unnecessary.

This is where high-tech diagnostic tools, such as AI based ones, come in and help prevent overscreening and subsequent overtreatment. Machine learning models, for instance, are trained on existing high-risk lesions, considering variables as broad as demographics and family history. They are hoped to correctly predict breast cancer with greater accuracy than most traditional methods.

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Callbacks for false positives are said to have been reduced in recent years, thanks to new technology that incorporate 3D data, facilitating the detection of the difference between, say, a breast mass and an overlap of normal tissue. These forms of screening are usually performed in conjunction with conventional mammograms to improve accuracy and reliability of diagnosis.

Matias Campiani is the CEO of Welzwaze, a tech company he co-founded that focuses on the development of AI-based diagnostic and health monitoring solutions, with an emphasis on early breast cancer detection. Learn more about this technology on this page.

Technology And Health Care: The Broad Strokes

When people are admitted into hospitals nowadays, they seldom notice the technology that surrounds them. Health care is one of the industries that has benefitted greatly from the endless technological breakthroughs the past decades have seen. From scanning to diagnosis, to data management to treatment design, technology has made health care much more efficient. 

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One of the perfect examples of technology’s impact on the healthcare industry can be seen in rural places where healthcare professionals have a difficult time reaching. Through the wonders of mobile technology, diagnosis and treatment are a possibility. Today, physicians can now see patients via cameras and scan the bodies of people who are ill to come up with their own diagnosis. 

Technology has also made it possible for physicians to access the medical records of their patients remotely. Through smartphones and laptops, whenever a physician comes across a patient in the field, they no longer need to call the hospital to ask for information. This makes medical missions all over the world very much possible. 

As for people who are always on the go, they no longer need to stand in line or even call a hospital to set up an appointment. Appointments can be set with only a few taps of the screen. 

Technology has also made it easier and less dangerous to train medical professionals via simulations and virtual reality. Who knows what else technology can bring into health care? What do you think?

Image source: tech-new.org

Matias Campiani is an alumnus of both Universidad Católica Argentina and Carnegie Mellon. He was a founding partner in many companies and presently heads Welwaze, which focuses the development of AI-based diagnostic and health monitoring solutions. Learn more about him and his work here.