Breast Cancer Grand Round with A/Prof Davis McCarthy
Improving Breast Cancer Risk Prediction with AI
7 October 2026
Population breast cancer screening in Australia remains largely one-size-fits-all, and established risk factors have limited power to identify women who will develop cancer between screens. This talk describes how the BRAIx AI reader — a strong breast cancer screening tool in its own right — was adapted and recalibrated on 397,648 BreastScreen Victoria mammography episodes to create the BRAIx risk score, a woman-specific predictor of current and 4-year breast cancer risk. In an independent cohort of 96,348 women, and in external Swedish validation, the score was the strongest tested predictor of intermediate-term risk, absorbed much of the signal from family history and mammographic density, and identified a top 2% high-risk group whose 4-year cancer probability rivals that of BRCA1/2 carriers. I will discuss what this new image-based breast cancer risk score makes possible for personalised, risk-based screening pathways
Warning: The VCCC Alliance Breast Cancer Grand Round is targeted at a clinical audience and features open discussion about real cases and patients. While these cases are de-identified, the imagery, content and discussion can be graphic. It is not appropriate for consumer participants.
A/Prof Davis McCarthy
Davis started in Bioinformatics as a UROP student (and Honours student, and RA) with Prof Gordon Smyth in the Bioinformatics Division at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. He worked on differential expression methods for RNA-seq data, most notably the edgeR package. He completed a DPhil in Statistics at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof Peter Donnelly, supported by a General Sir John Monash Scholarship. Davis then undertook a postdoc in Dr Oliver Stegle's group at the European Bioinformatics Insitute in Cambridge, UK. At EBI, Davis worked on single-cell methods development and on projects linking DNA variation to single-cell gene expression. He returned to Melbourne in late 2018 to start the Bioinformatics and Cellular Genomics group at St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research, is an honorary Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and is an Associate Member of Melbourne Integrative Genomics. Davis's lab works on methods development and collaborative projects with a focus on single-cell and spatial 'omics and medical imaging.
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