Artificial intelligence could help almost halve the workload of radiologists when it comes to searching routine scans for signs of breast cancer, a large Swedish study suggested on Wednesday.

The interim results of the trial were hailed as promising, but the authors cautioned that more research was needed before AI can be used to screen for breast cancer on a wider scale.

While increasingly convincing chatbots such as ChatGPT have driven speculation about the future potential applications of AI, one area in which the technology has already shown proficiency is in reading medical scans.