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Well the ways that don't involve surgery are themselves less accurate heuristics with false positives. How can they calibrate without being certain if it is a t
by Nasrudith 7y ago
Well the ways that don't involve surgery are themselves less accurate heuristics with false positives. How can they calibrate without being certain if it is a true or false positive or negative?
Better imaging is an option but that often falls into dangerous in itself or easier said than done like say trying to do detection of cancer by scent.
Machine learning is fundamentally GIGO and tends to learn smartass shortcuts if one isn't careful. "The healthy sample data is less zoomed in while the cancer ones are zoomed in - therefore full chest x-ray is fine but a lung X-ray is cancer."
- docker_up 7y agoThis type of attitude is typical, where one likes to dismiss new ideas and keep status quo instead of coming up with new ideas or innovations. The point is that there is an opportunity for the Steve Jobs of health care to come up with a way, a new innovative novel way, for classification of tumors to be improved without needing biopsy. Once we have that, then we can take tests to our heart's content. Right now, the attitude of "we shouldn't have people take tests and detect cancer early because our current method of determining if they are cancerous would make it too hard" isn't acceptable.
- skybrian 7y agoPresumably none of us here are inventors of new medical technology. We are just amateurs talking about this casually on Hacker News. Saying it's "unacceptable" doesn't change anything from either the doctor or patient's point of view. Until the new tech comes along, we need to accept the limitations of what we have now.
- jtms 7y agoI agree with you, but I think the original point was that we may already have technologies that could be employed, but that there is concern they are not being used
- Gibbon1 7y agoMy limited experience is that for small contained cancers imaging can't predict the future course for the tumor because you need cellar resolution that you can't get without a biopsy and a microscope and or genetic tests. Even then it's really common to see a biopsy come back as 'indeterminate'. If it's indeterminate then now what? You either punt and do nothing or go for excision. Consider this tidbit: A lot of slow moving low grade cancers it hardly matters when you find them. Early or later matters little. Whereas aggressive cancers often are untreatable. Find them early, find them late you'll die either way. And fast growing cancers often fully develop between screenings.
- sheeshkebab 7y agoIn other words - you’re dead either way - go have a beer instead?