The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has awarded $1 million to Prof. Regina Barzilay, for her development of an artificial intelligence-based system for early detection of breast cancer.
Only the most important prizes, such as the Turing Prize or the Nobel Prize, give sums of this size, said Yolanda Gil, a member of the award committee.
Prof. Barzilay is the first winner of such a prestigious award from Ben-Gurion University's faculty and graduates.
Barzilay completed her bachelor's degree in 1993 and her master's degree 5 years later (under the supervision of Prof. Michael Elhadad) both in BGU's Department of Computer Science. She completed her doctorate at Columbia University, and since 2003 has been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Today she is a Delta Electronics professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
Barzilay's personal story is very much a part of her groundbreaking scientific and research work. In 2013, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and while undergoing treatment, she became aware of the fact that technologies that are used in an infinite number of applications in different fields of life, are not used in medicine.
It was at this point that she decided to apply her skills to the world of medicine and began to investigate the subject of early breast cancer detection.
The problems she herself experienced with old diagnostic methods, which relied mainly on the human eye and not automation, encouraged her along the long path to a breast cancer predictive model, which increases the ability to diagnose women with breast cancer up to 5 years before the illness manifests itself.
The AI model developed by Prof. Barzilay is based on algorithms and machine learning, and can examine hundreds of thousands of mammography results and predict which are likely to develop into tumors. Massachusetts General Hospital is already using the model.
In addition, in her ground-breaking research, Barzilay has used AI to develop a powerful antibiotic which destroys antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Senior researchers who took part in the project, including Prof. James Collins of MIT, estimate that it is one of the most effective drugs of its kind ever developed.
