3 ms·
> I guess that means 5% false positives? That wouldn't be bad. Due to Bayes' Theorem, this can result in the majority of patients with a positive result being
by anorwell 7y ago
> I guess that means 5% false positives? That wouldn't be bad.
Due to Bayes' Theorem, this can result in the majority of patients with a positive result being patients without cancer. Depending on what treatment is taken, and the psychological burden of erroneously thinking you have cancer, the negatives of the additional screening could outweigh the positives.
- egocodedinsol 7y agoFWIW, it's not like the doctor is going to send you home with a diagnosis based on this screening. The psychological burden would persist only until further testing and analysis. And in any case, human radiologists have FPs and FNs, too. The question is how close and in what circumstances are we approaching current human radiologist performance.
- ska 7y agoNo, the problem is work up rate. If you significantly increase the rate of biopsy (typically one of the possible next steps) eventually you are going to kill people, as biopsy is not a zero risk procedure. You have to be really careful with FP rates in screening. Of course the answer to this could just be "don't biopsy due to only this result" but at some point that renders the approach pointless, if you can't find a cost effective way of mitigating the FPR.