3 ms·
> Fundamentally, it seems to me like there just aren't as many lung cancer screening scans out there for non-white patients as there are for white patients. Ju
by jsinai 6y ago
> Fundamentally, it seems to me like there just aren't as many lung cancer screening scans out there for non-white patients as there are for white patients.
Just to qualify, you mean for the USA alone? It seems to me that part of the challenge is recognizing that the research needs to take place beyond just Western countries, or acknowledging it where such research is already occurring. Understandably many people would not be so comfortable with Google accessing patient data from around the world, so the next challenge is how diverse and global data can be protected so that important medical research can take place without any compromise of privacy.
The challenge is hard but surely not impossible, as this was the approach taken by the AstraZeneca-Oxford (and others) which conducted part of its covid vaccine trials in South Africa to test efficacy on non-white populations.
- dontreact 6y agoAt the time we were conducting this research lung cancer screening existed mostly in Europe, China and the U.S. Note that if we had to conduct a 5 year multi site lung cancer screening trial ourselves in addition to doing the research, there would be basically no way of getting private funding for that. Those trials are very, very expensive and take several years to reach a conclusion. Add to that the potential optics of Google “experimenting” in developing countries and the blowback risk from that...