AI-Enhanced Breast Cancer Screening Helped a Patient Take Action Early
When Donna went for her routine breast cancer screening in summer 2026, she expected the same result she had received for years: everything looks fine. Instead, the artificial intelligence tools Mount Sinai uses for all screenings helped to detect early-stage breast cancer.
As a senior cancer researcher and oncology nurse practitioner, Donna spends her professional life caring for patients with cancer. Around the time she was due for her own screening, she was helping care for a young woman with metastatic breast cancer.
“My screenings always came back fine,” Donna says. “Cancer didn’t run in my family, so it wasn't something I was particularly worried about, but I thought, ‘You know what? I'm due for my screening,’” she says. “So I scheduled my appointment, thinking nothing of it.”
She has dense breast tissue, which can make abnormalities harder to detect. So she was given an ultrasound as well as a mammogram. The mammogram came back negative, but the ultrasound revealed two very small areas of concern.
“The lesions were tiny,” Donna says. “Typically, the recommendation might have been to come back in six months for another scan.”
However, the images were also analyzed using an artificial intelligence tool that helps radiologists assess breast ultrasound findings and identify areas that may need closer evaluation.
“The radiologist came into the room, sat down next to me, and said that if I were her daughter, she would get the biopsies done rather than wait six months,” Donna recalls. “So I moved forward with the biopsy.”
The biopsy revealed ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), sometimes called stage 0 breast cancer, in one of Donna’s breasts. In DCIS, abnormal cells are confined to the milk ducts and have not spread into surrounding breast tissue. The biopsy also found atypical hyperplasia in the other breast, a noncancerous condition that can significantly increase a woman's risk of developing breast cancer in the future.
“What stands out to me is that if the AI hadn't flagged those lesions, I likely would have been told to come back in six months,” Donna says. “Realistically, that could have become eight months or even a year. By then, the cancer might have become invasive.”
Because of the discovery of DCIS and her elevated risk, Donna decided to undergo a bilateral (double) mastectomy.
“It was an extremely difficult choice,” she says. “But I wanted to do everything I could to reduce the chances of facing invasive cancer later.”
As of October 2026, Donna was cancer-free, and a next step was reconstructive surgery. Because the cancer was caught so early, she did not require chemotherapy or additional cancer treatment beyond surgery.
“I was lucky,” she says. “The cancer was found at the earliest possible stage, and because it was caught early, I avoided chemotherapy and a much more serious diagnosis. That's something I'm incredibly grateful for every day.”
Donna hopes her story will encourage other women not to delay routine screenings. She also wants women with dense breast tissue to understand the importance of supplemental imaging and advanced screening technologies.
“I've heard dense breasts described as trying to find a snowman in a blizzard,” she says. “Sometimes you need additional tools to see what's there.”
Mount Sinai has been using AI in breast imaging for nearly four years and has applied it to more than 250,000 mammograms and ultrasounds, helping to enhance cancer detection and to significantly reduce the number of unnecessary patient callbacks for additional screenings.
“There's a lot of discussion about AI, but this is a real example of how it can help patients,” Donna says. “In my case, it found a cancer that was invisible to me and extremely difficult to detect.”
Schedule a mammogram at Mount Sinai.