Slashdot Mirror
Computer Detection Effective In Spotting Cancer
Anti-Globalism notes a large study out of the UK indicating that computer-aided detection can be as effective at spotting breast cancer as two experts reading the x-rays. Mammograms in Britain are routinely checked by two radiologists or technicians, which is thought to be better than a single review (in the US only a single radiologist reads each mammogram). In a randomized study of 31,000 women, researchers found that a single expert aided by a computer does as well as two pairs of eyes. CAD spotted nearly the same number of cancers, 198 out of 227, compared to 199 for the two readers. "In places like the United States, 'Where single reading is standard practice, computer-aided detection has the potential to improve cancer-detection rates to the level achieved by double reading,' the researchers said."
Worry not, this is standard practice. Although there is general support that CAD (computer-assisted diagnosis) is effective vs. a second reader, there is still a bit of controversy in the field from time to time, since the results have not been overwhelmingly in favor of CAD yet. There's always at least one talk on the general usefulness of CAD at conferences. Sometimes whole sections get devoted to the topic.
What is a bit more puzzling is why it isn't as prevalent in diagnosis of other types of cancer. Most of the computer-aided detection algorithms draw on general machine learning and image processing techniques rather than specific domain-knowledge of the breast, and thus many of them can be applied, sometimes without any changes, to other organs. There is nothing particularly special about the breast.
My group developed a CAD system for MRI images of the brain, and in the course of performing experiments to put in the paper, I decided to run a few images from a breast CAD project through the classifier. Sure enough, the classifier we had developed for MRIs correctly classified 96% of the mammograms we fed it as well.
system, there is a synergy between man and machine. Our system was for a general practitioner (general diagnosis with symptoms, physical findings, history, tests, etc as input). The computer is somewhat "dumb", but it always checks all the possibilities. The doctor would be looking for the usual stuff, and sometimes miss the more exotic diseases that would turn up from time to time. The machine would flag some exotic condition with a high probability, and the doctor would go "Interesting! I hadn't thought of that, let's check it out." Dr. House probably doesn't need one :-)