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Introduction: Books and papers are the most relevant source of theoretical knowledge for medical education. New technologies of artificial intelligence can be designed to assist in selected educational tasks, such as reading a corpus made up of multiple documents and extracting relevant information in a quantitative way. Methods: Thirty experts were selected transparently using an online public call on the website of the sponsor organization and on its social media. Six books edited or co-edited by members of this panel containing a general knowledge of breast cancer or specific surgical knowledge have been acquired. This collection was used by a team of computer scientists to train an artificial neural network based on a technique called Word2Vec. Results: The corpus of six books contained about 2.2 billion words for 300d vectors. A few tests were performed. We evaluated cosine similarity between different words. Discussion: This work represents an initial attempt to derive formal information from textual corpus. It can be used to perform an augmented reading of the corpus of knowledge available in books and papers as part of a discipline. This can generate new hypothesis and provide an actual estimate of their association within the expert opinions. Word embedding can also be a good tool when used in accruing narrative information from clinical notes, reports, etc., and produce prediction about outcomes. More work is expected in this promising field to generate "real-world evidence." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The rapid spread of COVID‐19 across the globe is forcing surgical oncologists to change their daily practice. We sought to evaluate how breast surgeons are adapting their surgical activity to limit viral spread and spare hospital resources. Methods: A panel of 12 breast surgeons from the most affected regions of the world convened a virtual meeting on April 7, 2020, to discuss the changes in their local surgical practice during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Similarly, a Web‐based poll based was created to evaluate changes in surgical practice among breast surgeons from several countries. Results: The virtual meeting showed that distinct countries and regions were experiencing different phases of the pandemic. Surgical priority was given to patients with aggressive disease not candidate for primary systemic therapy, those with progressive disease under neoadjuvant systemic therapy, and patients who have finished neoadjuvant therapy. One hundred breast surgeons filled out the poll. The trend showed reductions in operating room schedules, indications for surgery, and consultations, with an increasingly restrictive approach to elective surgery with worsening of the pandemic. Conclusion: The COVID‐19 emergency should not compromise treatment of a potentially lethal disease such as breast cancer. Our results reveal that physicians are instinctively reluctant to abandon conventional standards of care when possible. However, as the situation deteriorates, alternative strategies of de‐escalation are being adopted. Implications for Practice: This study aimed to characterize how the COVID‐19 pandemic is affecting breast cancer surgery and which strategies are being adopted to cope with the situation. This article evaluates how breast surgeons are adapting surgical activity to limit viral spread and spare resources during the COVID‐19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]