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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 am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one.
It is hard to evaluate doctors. Kaiser (a big American health company) tried to evaluate their doctors by patient outcome. It didn't work because the best doctors tended to have the worst record of good outcomes. Why? Because, since they were the best, they were often assigned the worst-case patients.
My nurse scowled at me when I laughed when she told me to jack off a sample for her. I started to stroke the cup and she looked like she was going to smack me. It good being from Brasil. Americans have no sense of humor.
Yeah.. dental nurses can be like that.
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.
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one
From TFS "The results showed an accurate diagnosis in 99.38 per cent of cases". Only a (very) good pathologist would reach such a high %, thus "as well as a pathologist" should be "better than a pathologist".
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I did not know that pathologist was a disease, must be one of these new psychiatric conditions that keep popping every now and than. Anyway I'm happy that an AI can diagnose that.
Also, looking forward to see the automated "you got cancer" email, written by an underpaid Indian contractor.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
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.
It's not really like that when you get into the details. My wife is a pathologist. First off anatomic pathologists do not look at photos as a general proposition. They look at slides under a microscope for the most part. There are some pathology imaging systems but they are not in widespread use currently for both cost and technical reasons. It turns out to be technically challenging and expensive in many cases to make an image of every slide with sufficient detail to be useful - it's cheaper and more flexible to just look at the slide directly under a microscope in most cases. Imaging systems will become more common in time but there are a lot of technical issues to work out first.
There are two types of pathology. Clinical pathology and anatomic pathology. Clinical pathology is what is done with stuff like blood draws. It's sent to a lab where the tissue sample is run through some expensive machines which spit out a computer report. You've probably seen some of these. Anatomic pathologists on the other hand deal in tissue samples that result from surgeries or from biopsies. The tissue sample is sent to a lab where it is usually embedded in wax, stained, and then looked at under a microscope to render a diagnosis. This diagnosis is generally based on morphology as well as information gained from molecular and chemical stains. In essence it is pattern matching. In time anatomic pathology will likely come to resemble clinical pathology more and more. However this does not mean the need for the pathologist will go away. It just will mean that their job will involve managing automation and interpreting the results. There are many cases where the results are ambiguous and a human expert will remain necessary to reconcile the problems and interact with the various clinicians to ensure the proper course of treatment occurs.
It is important to understand that the important word in your comment is "opinion". Diagnosis is not binary. Disease criteria are not nearly as well defined as you and I would like them to be. The difference between "mild dysplasia" and "severe dysplasia" is often more of a gestalt thing than a function of rigorous criteria but it can have significant clinical implications (surgery versus no surgery or chemo vs watch and wait). In a lot of diseases there isn't sufficient evidence available to have useful gradations relating to clinical outcomes. It's getting better all the time but there is a lot that is unknown. What the pathologist is doing is essentially making an educated guess based on morphology and other evidence as to what disease processes could be going on. In essence they are being asked to predict how a bit of tissue will grow in the future. They are building a differential diagnosis and explaining which diagnosis they favor and why. Computers can do this and in some cases they can be really helpful in ensuring the differential is complete. But there also will always be those weird and difficult cases which is where it is unlikely the need for humans will go away. Automation will be very helpful to anatomic pathology but it's not going to replace human pathologist any time soon. It will just make them more efficient and (hopefully) reduce costs. What will happen is the computer will spit out a report with some results and a differential but the pathologist will examine the report and interpret it in the