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AI Can Diagnose Prostate Cancer As Well As a Pathologist (sciencebusiness.net)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Business: Chinese researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system which can diagnose cancerous prostate samples as accurately as any pathologist, holding out the possibility of streamlining and eliminating variation in the process of cancer diagnosis. The system may also help overcome shortages of trained pathologists and in the longer term lead to automated or partially-automated prostate diagnosis. Confirmation of a prostate cancer diagnosis normally requires a biopsy sample to be examined by a pathologist. Now the Chinese AI system has shown similar levels of accuracy to pathologists and can also accurately classify the level of malignancy of the cancer, eliminating the variability which can creep into human diagnoses. [Hongqian Guo, who led the research group] took 918 prostate samples from 283 patients and ran these through the AI system, with the software gradually learning and improving diagnosis. The pathology images were subdivided into 40,000 smaller samples of which 30,000 were used to train the software while the remaining 10,000 were used to test accuracy. The results showed an accurate diagnosis in 99.38 per cent of cases, using a human pathologist as a gold standard. Guo said that means the AI system is as accurate as a pathologist. The research was presented at the 33rd European Association of Urology Congress in Copenhagen.
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one. What is the Truth Table we use to figure out whether a particular pathologist is good?
There is strong circumstantial evidence that American doctors significantly overtreat suspected cancers. You know what happens when you as an oncologist treat as cancer something that is not dangerous? Your survival rate goes up! And the patient, who has suffers enormous physical and psychological damage during the year or so of controlled poisoning (chemo) enters into the throngs of The Cult of Cancer Survivors, who will testify about his or her brush with death and how we need more aggressive cancer screenings so that cancer survival rates can continue to go up.
I can't wait to get a delicate, sensitive robotic probe up my backside. I imagine it'll go something like this .....
Please pull down your pants and bend over. You have twenty seconds to comply
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Ok, again, here's how it works: 1. You have symptoms that could be cancer or something else, like for example a growth of tissue. 2. You go to the doctor and he suggests to test for cancer. 3. A biopsy is taken. That is to say, a human being cuts out a small bit of tissue. 4. The biopsy is imaged. This means that they prepare it in a special way that will make it easier to make out the difference between cancer and no cancer. Then they put it under the microscope and take some photos. 5. The diagnosis is made. For this until now you need a specialized pathologist with many years of experience and very expensive training to look at the photos and give you his opinion of whether this is cancer he's looking at in the photos or not. Or apparently now you can use a computer program to check out the photos and give you an almost equally accurate opinion. 6. A report is written and sent to your doctor. 7. At your next appointment you get the news.