24 ms·

“Amateur” programmer fought cancer with 50 Nvidia Geforce 1080Ti

1143 points by coolwulf 4y ago

coolwulf 4y ago
Recently a Chinese media interviewed me and I talked about a few side projects I have done in the past. I talked about the Neuralrad Mammo Screening project and Neuralrad multiple brain mets SRS platform. More awareness on radiation therapy to the general public will greatly help the community and we believe Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS) will eventually replace majority of the whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT) in the next five years. Here is the link to the original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7094940100450107935/ https://www.toutiao.com/article/7094940100450107935/
- mamborambo 4y ago
  Super impressed. Amateurs can and do play their parts in science --- there are numerous discoveries made in astronomy, mathematics, and definitely in computer applied sciences that sprang from the minds of amateurs.
- sylware 4y ago
  javascript only link. Any compatible link with noscript/basic (x)html browsers?
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    And I would like the content sent to me in Morse code via telegraph.
    - fL0per 4y ago
      https://telegra.ph/This-amateur-programmer-once-used-50-1080Ti-cards-to-fight-cancer-05-21 https://telegra.ph/This-amateur-programmer-once-used-50-1080... There, it may content errors, since it's a machine translated copy what had to be telegraphed by the operator. Thank him, he's a brilliant guy.
- ska 4y ago
  WBRT is pretty brutal. Am I right in thinking you are focusing on multiple site treatment/palliative treatment of metastatic presentations? High site count also or sticking to say < 5?
  - coolwulf 4y ago
    Exactly, I'm working on a workflow platform for multiple brain metastasis stereotactic radiosurgery. This will greatly benefit patients with more than 5 BMs.
    - ska 4y ago
      Cool stuff! I've done some work in adjacent areas - there are huge challenges (not only technical) but great to feel you are making an impact.
    - samstave 4y ago
      ELI5, please.
      - ska 4y ago
        Metastatic disease is when a cancer spreads to multiple locations. This can make it difficult/impossible/impractical to treat effectively, especially surgically. Whole brain radiotherapy works by killing everything a little bit in the hopes that the tumors die first (e.g. like chemo). There are good reasonswhy this tends to mostly-sort-of be true, but getting the balance right is hard and too much dose will definitely cause other problems. SRS is a way of targeting radiation directly to locations to kill cells, with less effective dose (hence damage) to other parts of the brain. It's all pretty harsh stuff, and you can die from the necrotic tissue caused by it, also. Often with this kind of disease you know you aren't going to cure someone, but you can get rid of symptoms and make people more comfortable (palliative care).
- abfan1127 4y ago
  Google Translate link - https://www-toutiao-com.translate.goog/article/7094940100450107935/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp&wid=1653064063070 https://www-toutiao-com.translate.goog/article/7094940100450...
  - gregsadetsky 4y ago
    Thanks -- and here's the site as well -- http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload
- pen2l 4y ago
  Oh, it's you! What a beacon of light and inspiration you are. Thanks for your work. That said, I welcome you to publish your work so it can become even better after a formalized peer-review process.
  - coolwulf 4y ago
    For the multiple brain mets SRS project, we will be presenting at this year's AAPM annual meeting.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Super effort. I understand your reluctance to accept funding but if you ever change your mind on that be sure to publish it here on HN. If giving you more tools means more progress in this domain without the usual red tape then I'm all for giving you as much of a push as possible.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    As a general thought, it's super easy to start a Patreon account to accept donations. Seems pretty effective. :)
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Thank you for all you've done for people, it's amazing and inspiring!
- hehepran 4y ago
  Sir, you are super cool.
- Billsen 4y ago
  Nice job!
- llaolleh 4y ago
  Your story was inspirational. It's really cool to run this project to help others without expecting any payment.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Unless it's more expensive than existing treatments the medical industry will close the circles around you excluding you. That's why not one startup has hacked healthcare in America, not one. No breakaway successes making pharma cheaper. Like those incubators in Bangladesh, for premature babies not startups that is, those did OK. Some pill startups yes, but again that's an expensivification of medicine. If you can make medicine more expensive, they welcome you in! Jim Clark tried this, he was on a roll after Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Huge roll about as strong as Elon Musk as a serial entrepreneur. Then he targeted healthcare and couldn't do shit, just couldn't get anything to happen. He literally talked about getting "rid of all the assholes" by which he meant insurance and doctors and hospitals and middlemen and pharma and all the other "assholes" of that nature in his own words, but leave "only one asshole in the middle--us [paraphrased]." It's in a book. That book also talks about guys going on airplanes and chasing goats off cliffs, saying "Some people do this." Well the real structure of medicine isn't designed around the human body, it's designed around cornering the market. Market dominance. So of course it has this immune system against cost reduction and efficiencies--efficiencies especially--and you do know it lobbies, don't you? And can bribe the FDA like the Sacklers did? Or lobby the FDA, and then bribe underneath so when people see favoritism they think it's the over-the-counter placebo causing a placebo effect without suspecting an additional more potent under-the-table dosage of money. In case the administration has built up a tolerance to the over-the-counter stuff.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    What about the NHS in the UK? They should be more aligned to wanting cheaper cancer diagnosis and also anything to help people. If America has dysfunctional healthcare there is still the rest of the world. Which might be good for Americans eventually as the tech will come across one way or another.
    - anamax 4y ago
      > If America has dysfunctional healthcare there is still the rest of the world. Which might be good for Americans eventually as the tech will come across one way or another. Which raises the question - why does the vast majority of healthcare tech development come from the US? (I included "development" to get around the out-sourcing of testing to China.)
- rob_c 4y ago
  Fantastic work dude. On behalf of anyone who might one day benefit thanks and congrats.
- jabrams2003 4y ago
  What's the best way to contact you? I've been fighting brain cancer for 7 years and work closely with a group of neuro-oncologists, researchers, non-profits, and investors in the space. I'd love to chat.
  - coolwulf 4y ago
    Feel free to send me emails: coolwulf@gmail.com
    - panabee 4y ago
      this is incredible. thanks. 1. do you have a patreon or something where people can support you? 2. do you know how to obtain the nucleotide sequences of c-MYC? 3. have you seen machine learning applications that can predict protein function? specifically, the goal is to predict if protein X could participate in cleaving of DNA similar to CRISPR Cas9? false positives are okay, provided the negatives are accurate (i.e., guarantees protein cannot cleave DNA like Cas9).
      - elmolino89 4y ago
        >do you know how to obtain the nucleotide sequences of c-MYC? Check: https://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Transcript/Summary?db=core;g=ENSG00000136997;r=8:127735434-127742951;t=ENST00000621592 https://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Transcript/Summary?db=c... This is the main transcript, the remaining 9 are in the table
        panabee 4y ago
        thanks so much! would it be possible to contact you for other questions? or could you recommend a reddit sub for questions like this? researchgate doesn't seem responsive. for instance, how to obtain the nucleotide sequences for TP53, or for the NHN/RuvC domains of CRISPR Cas9? thanks again for your help.
        elmolino89 4y ago
- rg111 4y ago
  Hi. Some great projects. What's more commendable is your dedication towards your projects and seeing them through to end- to the point that they are actually useful. This is what I truly admire. I have a question for you. What is the tech stack that you use? And if it is not too much: What resources did you use to learn Deep Learning?
- koprulusector 4y ago
  > Recently a Chinese media interviewed me and I talked about a few side projects I have done in the past. I apologize if this has been asked and answered before, but do you speak Mandarin, or was the interview in English? Asking out of curiosity if it’s the former, and if so, how difficult was it to learn whilst also working on this and other things? And are there any resources or tips you might share that you found helpful?
  - qzw 4y ago
    According to the article, Coolwulf went to Nanjing University for undergrad, so pretty safe to assume he would do an interview with Chinese media in Mandarin. And since he likely grew up in China, it was probably very easy for him to learn Mandarin indeed!
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  Where did you learn to program on distributed Nvidia GPUs? The article implied you were self taught and learning to do this is quite challenging for various reasons. Not least, Nvidia's documentation is not the best resource to learn from. This seems like quite a lot of work to understand ML and write custom CUDA code to get this to work. Do you have any insight about how you taught yourself these things and what tools you use?
  - MaximumYComb 4y ago
    I'm not your OP but I learnt all these things at univeristy during my BCompSci. Understanding ML algorithms came down to a lot of math / statistics units. I learnt about parallel computing during a dedicated unit called "Distributed and Parallel Computing"
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Not the OP but I taught myself in a couple of weeks picking apart some of the sample CUDA code and reading some of the (excellent) pdfs on the architecture of the Nvidia range. At the time the GTX285 was hot stuff, the same code runs unchanged on a 1080ti and I would expect it to continue to work on even more modern incarnations. CUDA is pretty good as a platform to build on if you understand the basic idea behind the engine, and some low level experience will come in very handy. And ML on CUDA vs ML in C or some other language is typically a matter of shuttling the data and the results back and forth between main memory and the card as well as implementing the most time consuming portions of the algorithm you are using in a custom kernel, you can usually get 50% or so of the theoretical maximum speed with relatively little effort. Getting to full speed is going to be a lot harder, but then you could of course also add another card (or another three) get get an instant boost. Usually you would - nowadays at least - use someone else's optimized kernel + ML library but if you wanted to roll your own that's doable.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Did coolwulf write his own CUDA code, or use machine learning libraries that already come with CUDA implementations, like TensorFlow or PySpark?
- FpUser 4y ago
  I am not a religious man at all but God Bless you. You are an amazing human being and a source of inspiration.
- dclowd9901 4y ago
  As a “professional” programmer, I’m humbled by your accomplishments. I really must find ways to contribute more to the world. It seems there’s a lot of opportunities in AI to do it.
- iaw 4y ago
  You're clearly well accomplished in multiple areas. How do approach learning something new?
- sizzle 4y ago
  Imagine for a moment if FB and Google took all their developers and resources and applied it to solving cancer, how long do you think it would take to make a dent in the problem space? Or is there a hard limit stopping us from progressive like Moores law for scientific understanding.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Yea… but instead, ads are like 3% more effective each year. So, you know, silver linings.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - NLPlatypus 4y ago
      Google does have a company Calico (California Life Corporation) (I’m hoping to work there after my PhD)
      - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        Sure if you are willing to ignore all evidence and instead go with a hopeful expectation of “doing good”.
  - throwaway0220 4y ago
    > Imagine for a moment if FB and Google took all their developers and resources... It's a nice thought exercise, but of course not realistic. FAANGs wouldn't be able to attract or retain the talent if they were purely in scientific medical research (where do you think those fancy offices and fat paychecks comes from?). Having said that, it doesn't have to be either/or. I strongly believe that companies can be successful in balancing between thriving commercial businesses and using its profits to advance research that can benefit the society at large. Case in point: Google's DeepMind has for years published groundbreaking work in various areas including breast cancer research [1], protein folding [2], energy savings and climate change [3], and more. Also Calico [4], or its investments in health startups via GV, and of course all the well known services to users. What I'd like to see is more companies following a path where a portion of its profits is used to fund research in areas that can cause societal change for the better (which, in its turn, may eventually became new sources of revenue down the road - e.g. protein folding, self-driving cars). (disclaimer: Googler here, but no relationship with any of the projects mentioned) [1] https://www.deepmind.com/publications/international-evaluation-of-an-ai-system-for-breast-cancer-screening https://www.deepmind.com/publications/international-evaluati... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/22/1029973/deepmind-alphafold-protein-folding-biology-disease-drugs-proteome/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/22/1029973/deepmind... [3] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/real-world-challenges-for-agi https://www.deepmind.com/blog/real-world-challenges-for-agi [4] https://www.calicolabs.com/ https://www.calicolabs.com/
- sdo72 4y ago
  Thank you for doing this, you deserve a superhero badge! It's very inspirational.
- nkzd 4y ago
  You are an inspiration. Thank you for restoring my faith in this field.
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
  Sir, We've all been hearing that AI will revolutionize medical diagnostics for a long time, seen startups come & go in this space but seeing your work impact lives on the ground has convinced me that the secret missing ingredient was a self-less human who can build an accessible(non-commercial) solution for the masses. A decade ago I did a voluntary work on a simple app for oral cancer detection(questionnaire, data-entry) with an oncologist, Who used it to for survey in the tribal regions of India and he used to say how lack of early detection is the number one reason for so many deaths(many die without knowing that they had cancer). He's now settled in Germany, But I would still pass this story to him & perhaps his colleagues in India could make use of it. Thank you.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  You are a hero. God bless you and thank you for efforts to help others.
- adultSwim 4y ago
  Great work. I'm inspired seeing others use their skills to work on something important. So many of the smartest, most well educated engineers of my generation have put their talents to use doing things that are of little value to society. Thank you for demonstrating to us what else is possible.
ska 4y ago
It's an interesting subject, with a long history; I think many of the biggest challenges are not technical. The first commercially available AI/ML approach to breast cancer screening was available (US) in the late 90s. There have been many iterations and some improvements since, none of which really knock it out of the park but most clinical radiologists see the value. Perhaps the more interesting question then is why are people getting value out of uploading their own scans, i.e. why does their standard care path not already include this?
- coolwulf 4y ago
  The reason I made this project 100% free and available to the general public is to help patients, especially in the remote area who has limited access to experienced radiologists for diagnosis, to at least get a second opinion on their mammogram. And I think this has certain value and this is why I'm doing this project. Hao
  - ska 4y ago
    Inconsistent care is a really good point. I wasn't trying to be negative - hope it didn't come across that way. I was hoping to point out that systemic issues in health care management, at least in a lot of countries, seems to be more of a problem that tech for things like this. Out of curiosity, how are you handling the data access and labelling issues here? I suspect that's the key issue that has limited the performance of the commercial offerings (hardly limited to this problem or this space). OTOH in terms of real impact, properly leveraging a more modestly successful algorithm will probably help more people than getting a few more %. With the (strong) caveat that in a space like this you really have to look at work-up rate and balance risks.
  - monkeydust 4y ago
    There is history of breast cancer in my family and anything that can be done to improve outcomes has to be highly commended. I did however have the same question and this > to at least get a second opinion on their mammogram. for me makes a lot of sense, even in developed countries where you get a result but want extra assurances. It would be interesting to know (assuming you have the data, even anecdotally) if the second opinions using this overturned professional ones and from those how many were corrected an original false negative mistake.
transfire 4y ago
Sadly, this would be illegal in the USA and get shut down pretty quickly.
- giantg2 4y ago
  More like a patent holder would usurp all the work someone else did and make a fortune off of it after taking 5 years to get through the red tape.
  - markus92 4y ago
    Na, this is all well-known work. This field is seriously big, lots of publications on it dating back to the early '90s.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  unlessI'm wrong, he's in Michigan.
  - charia 4y ago
    OP is probably talking about the legality of American hospitals using this software in an official capacity like some Chinese hospitals seem to be doing. I'm completely unfamiliar, but it wouldn't surprise me if for diagnosing? software like this to be used in an official medical capacity in America it would need to go through some sort of particular vetting process because if it isn't it might leave hospitals who use it open to lawsuits.
    - caycep 4y ago
      that would be a potential YC idea. A company that enables smaller groups to do clinical research w/o needing an army of people to wade through the regulatory red tape. That also isn't in and of itself a giant predatory CRO type organization.
      - dekhn 4y ago
pentium 4y ago
way cool, no need to label yourself amateur, software, hardware, radiology, and real impact. Hats off to you.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
What a service to society. Hats off to you to using your skills like that!
Hitton 4y ago
Is this machine translated? Some parts don't make much sense.
oversocialized 4y ago
ArtixFox 4y ago
did they win?
tfgg 4y ago
What peer review or regulatory approval process has this been through? Seems pretty irresponsible -- there are many notorious pitfalls encountered with ML for medical imaging. You shouldn't play with people's lives.
- mromanuk 4y ago
  This is like taking your temperature at home, are you making a diagnostic yourself? Not quite. But you can know some symptoms and take action (going to the doctor) maybe with less anxiety edit: grammar
  - Thaxll 4y ago
    What's the chance of taking the wrong temperature though?
    - mordae 4y ago
      Pretty high, actually.
  - tfgg 4y ago
    Thermometers are well understood, simple devices, and there are other complementary checks (e.g. does my forehead feel hot) if they fail. This project might lead to people thinking they're in the clear and not seek appropriate medical treatment, or be overtreated due to an error. You should always talk to a qualified doctor if you're concerned about your health, and not use projects like these for decision making.
    - arbitrandomuser 4y ago
      I don't see how a passive scan like this can be harmful . Ofcourse if it does show a positive one should confirm further with a biopsy or other standard confirmation diagnostic. As for false negatives... If you feel something is wrong you should get it checked thoroughly anyway .
light_hue_1 4y ago
As an AI/ML researcher who publishes in this area regularly, I will be using this as a case study for AI ethics classes. That this is allowed to go on is shocking. > In 2018, a programmer named “coolwulf” started a thread about a website he had made. Users just need to upload their X-ray images, then they can let AI to carry out their own fast diagnosis of breast cancer disease. Literally the worst fears that we have as a community is that people will recklessly apply ML to things like cancer screening on open websites and cause countless deaths, bankruptcies, needless procedures, etc. How many people went to this website, uploaded images, were told were ok and didn't follow up? How many were told they have cancer and insisted on procedures they didn't need? The website is totally unaccountable. Totally unregulated. Totally without any of the most basic ethical standards in medicine. Without even the most basic human rights for patients. This is frankly disgusting. In the US this would have been shut down by the FDA immediately. We should not be celebrating this unethical "science" that doesn't meet even the most basic of scientific standards or ethical standards. I can't believe this is getting upvoted here.
- karolist 4y ago
  I share your sentiment, people are focusing on successes too much but not scrutinise what potential outcomes false negatives in software like this can have.
  - light_hue_1 4y ago
    This is unimaginably worse than what Theranos did!
- coolwulf 4y ago
  Thank you for your reply. On the site, it's cleared marked and noted this is not for diagnosis. "This tool is only to provide you with the awareness of breast mammogram, not for diagnosis."
  - analyte123 4y ago
    The words “found malicious mass”, disclaimer or not, could be considered a diagnosis. You can probably say “anomaly”, or maybe even “classified as malicious mass”. With you having connections in the US, it is probably worth talking to an expert if you want to keep this online. Also, 50 GPUs seems like more than necessary!
1-6 4y ago
Goes to show that you don’t need to be a long time programmer to have impact in most areas of society. Why is Python so good? It democratizes by lowering the bar to coding.
somethoughts 4y ago
Admittedly I just skimmed the article but I feel like the title should be more - "This "amateur" medical...". His primary expertise is more physics/CS/programmer related than it is human biology/medicine.
OJFord 4y ago
'Amateur' oughtn't be scare-quoted because it's not a slur, many of the finest programmers were amateurs for many years before they were old enough to be given a job in the profession.
- ant6n 4y ago
  If u used to be a paid software programmer and got a different job, but continued doing programming side projects without pay, are u an amateur or not?
  - NHQ 4y ago
    It literally means "for the love".
  - Wohlf 4y ago
    Yes, but you'd also be a former professional. Amateur also isn't meant to be a negative term, it just means you do it as a hobby rather than as a profession.
- jxramos 4y ago
  I had an art teacher affectionately remind me the etymology for amateur > borrowed from French, going back to Middle French, "one who loves, lover," borrowed from Latin amātor "lover, enthusiastic admirer, devotee," from amāre "to have affection for, love, be in love, make love to" (of uncertain origin) + -tōr-, -tor, agent suffix https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amateur#etymology-anchor https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amateur#etymology... changes the feeling of it all when you get that context, someone who loves a subject pretty much--no qualifications skill wise or regarding depth but they love it and should presumably take things seriously to some degree as any lover would.
- gist 4y ago
  Using 'amateur' (quoted or not) is click bait. It's an embellishment to the rest of the headline. For that matter even though it's true the graphics cards are as well. Only thing that could have made it more click bait would be to also put in AI in the headline.
vmception 4y ago
> In short, it is to let the AI help you "look at the film", and the accuracy rate is almost comparable to professional doctors, and it is completely free. In the US, the issue is getting the Xray
themantalope 4y ago
This is very cool work. I'm a radiologist, I also work on developing ML/AI based systems for cancer detection and characterization. Literally just took a break for a few minutes from creating some labels and saw this as the top HN post! I think in some ways making the model available online can be good, but in other ways could be harmful too. Very complicated topic. 恭喜coolwulf，祝你继续成功。
- martincmartin 4y ago
  How could it be harmful? Is it just because of errors, i.e. false negative means person won't talk to doctor and won't be caught early; false positive means needless worry, maybe tarnish more general medical industry? Or something else?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    The consequences are false positives and negatives in cancer detection are well known (easily googled), and are actually extremely important when looking at cancer treatment in large populations. You nailed the most important ones.
  - themantalope 4y ago
    Yeah, those are part of the issue. For example on the webpage, there is no discussion about the false negative/positive rate of the system, and no comparison or link to an academic paper that compares the performance of the system to a trained breast radiologist. Does a patient take a negative exam as "I'm good!" and forego actually seeing a doctor, or having the exam read by a radiologist? A positive result is also a challenging situation. I've talked to patients before after diagnosing them, and as you could expect most people are shocked, scared or they want to know what they should do next. In breast radiology specifically (at least in the US) there is a well defined reporting lexicon and classification system. From what I can tell, the system does not use the lexicon or BI-RADS classification. https://www.acr.org/-/media/ACR/Files/RADS/BI-RADS/BIRADS-Reference-Card.pdf https://www.acr.org/-/media/ACR/Files/RADS/BI-RADS/BIRADS-Re... Breast cancer can be very subtle, and can be hard to figure out, especially if a patient has had surgery or other benign abnormalities. https://radiopaedia.org/cases/development-of-dcis?case_id=development-of-dcis&lang=us https://radiopaedia.org/cases/development-of-dcis?case_id=de... Diagnostic and screening images also undergo rigorous QA for the entire system. Does the model have some kind of QA built in? There is a just a small disclaimer at the top that says "we will not store your data on the server. please do not worry about privacy issues". Not exactly a formal or legal binding agreement. In fact, you can't even connect over https. http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload These are just a few things that come to mind off the top of my head. Like I said before, I do think that what coolwulf works on and is trying to do is good, and in the long run can help doctors better characterize findings and help patients. But like anything in health care, there are a lot of edge cases and side effects that you have to think about. The stakes are also very high.
latchkey 4y ago
ETH will soon move from PoW to PoS (let's not debate the timeline or if it is a good idea). This will put about 32 million GPUs worth of compute and millions of CPUs searching for something else to do (or just flood the market with used equipment). I have been searching, for years, for alternative workloads for these GPUs beyond just PoW mining and password cracking. Many of them are on systems with tiny cpus, little memory, little disk, little networking so the options are heavily limited. AI/ML/Rendering/Gaming actually make bad use cases. If anyone has thoughts on this, I'd appreciate hearing them. Let it all die is certainly an option, but it also seems just as wasteful as keeping it going. Maybe we can find a better use case, like somehow curing cancer...
- mwt 4y ago
  Folding@home would love to take a swing at a sliver of that compute
  - jseliger 4y ago
    It's peculiar to me that Folding@home never managed to get GPUs working for MacOS, given the platform's popularity: https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=32895 https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=32895 As a consequence, it seems not worth installing on MacOS: https://stats.foldingathome.org/os https://stats.foldingathome.org/os
    - dekhn 4y ago
      It's not worth implementing for MacOS because it woulnd't increase the overall folding rate very much given the relative weakness of the Mac GPUs compared to the existing f@h fleet.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  There are plenty of good uses, projects like BOINC have been using GPUs for good for over a decade. The problem is the incentive system disappears, it's a lot easier to get people to run 32 million GPUs when it makes them money instead of costs them money.
jonplackett 4y ago
Is 90% correct rate considered good enough for this kind of use? Seems like 1/10 wrong would be bad, how does that compare with a doctor doing it?
- latortuga 4y ago
  According to the American Cancer Society > About half of the women getting annual mammograms over a 10-year period will have a false-positive finding at some point.
  - jonplackett 4y ago
    Thanks. Any idea what the false negative is? I guess that’s the more important factor?
    - Zacharias030 4y ago
      The american screening system has very high rates of recalls to further examination (around 2-4x higher than good european screening systems). In Germany, roughly 20-25% of cancers are missed in screening (and often found 2 years later)
- Zacharias030 4y ago
  The 90% accuracy figure in the article unfortunately exposes the author as very ignorant. On a German breast cancer screening population, 90% accuracy is abysmal as ~99.2% of cases are negative. Just predicting „no cancer“ would achieve 99.2% accuracy. Accuracy is a very bad metric for such highly asymmetric problems. To provide some context: The German screening system is able to identify cancer in ~6/1000 of patients screened, and missing it for the remaining 2/1000. IIRC this is achieved by re-inviting in ~3% of cases to further examination, where ultrasound / needle biopsy / etc. can be done on a case by case basis.
725686 4y ago
For an evolutionary perspective of cancer and possible new ways to treat them, I recommend the new book "The cheating cell" by Athena Aktipis.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> Furthermore, the accuracy of tumor identification has reached 90%. How is this accuracy calculated? Further in the article it is noted that there is no patient data saved by the project: >> He said that he’s not sure actually how many people have used it because the data is not saved on the server due to patient privacy concerns. But during that time, he received a lot of thank-you emails from patients, many of them from China. Considering user privacy is laudable in my opinion, but I'm still curious to know how accuracy is known.
- Iv 4y ago
  Probably based on a test set from the original dataset.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    The expression "has reached" makes it sound more like an extrinsinc evaluation process has taken place (i.e. not on a test set).
notfed 4y ago
What does "90% accuracy" mean? Is this before or after applying Bayes' theorem?
- coolwulf 4y ago
  At the time of this model / work developed (late 2017 / early 2018), very few public mammogram datasets were available. So the model was trained on DDSM/MIAS and tested on InBreast dataset. The 90% accuracy was calculated with results on InBreast dataset.
westcort 4y ago
My key takeaways: * The free AI breast cancer detection website took coolwulf about three months of spare time, sometime he had to sleep in his office to get things done, before the site finally went live in 2018 * The website also gained a lot of attention from the industry, during which many domestic and foreign medical institutions, such as Fudan University Hospital, expressed their gratitude to him by email and were willing to provide financial and technical support * Afterwards, he and Weiguo Lu, now a tenured professor at University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, founded two software companies targeting the radiotherapy and started working on product development for cancer radiotherapy and artificial intelligence technologies * But in 2022, he returned with an even more important "brain cancer project" * coolwulf (Hao Jiang) (right) He told us that his parents are not medical professionals, and his interest in programming was fostered from a young age * A reliable AI for tumor detection can enable a large number of patients who cannot seek adequate medical diagnosis in time to know the condition earlier or provide a secondary opinion * He said that he’s not sure actually how many people have used it because the data is not saved on the server due to patient privacy concerns Link to the technology: http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/ http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/
- ramraj07 4y ago
  > A reliable AI for tumor detection can enable a large number of patients who cannot seek adequate medical diagnosis in time to know the condition earlier or provide a secondary opinion Citation Required?
- dekhn 4y ago
  that's an unadorned http link. Really?
redeyedtreefrog 4y ago
In the UK the NHS don't do screening for breast cancer for under 50s because it's believed that it would do more harm than good by leading to unnecessary treatment for cancers that would never have actually caused any harm, and even where no treatment is carried out it causes great distress. Though there are arguments that the age cut off is too high, and should be set at 40. The above is with regard to a well-funded and regulated screening program that presumably has much better precision/recall than this website. I wonder what the cut off age is for this website before the diagnoses cause more harm than good? 60? 70? This is getting lots of upvotes because it's confirmation bias for the large segment of HN readers who believe that problems would easily be solved by a small number of brilliant technologists, if only it weren't for governments and big organisations with all their rules and regulations.
- laingc 4y ago
  A lot of people, including myself, don’t believe that central health authorities have the right to make that call. Moreover, I personally don’t have confidence in their ability to make those kinds of decisions, and I believe the abysmal performance of the NHS supports my view.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    I share your disdain for a central authority in making these judgement calls, but I have even less confidence in the majority of people who think they can solve everything with AI. Signed, a data scientist with a PhD in biomedical engineering.
  - Gatsky 4y ago
    The NHS has finite resources. They have to decide if implementing a screening program is worthwhile or not, versus spending the money elsewhere. You can still go to your doctor and get a mammogram (or even a more useful test) if you have other reasons why this might be justified in your situation. They aren’t ‘banning’ mammograms for young women.
    - KennyBlanken 4y ago
ghoomketu 4y ago
Reading this article only makes me realise how crypto industry has crippled the progress independent researchers like this would badly need gpus for AI. How many really useful, cool and meaningful projects are stuck because such authors can't find or afford gpus - as they are being used to calculate meaningless hashes instead :/
green-salt 4y ago
Amazing work. I'm glad this is going to help so many people.
gregsadetsky 4y ago
1) I just downloaded the "The Mammographic Image Analysis Society database of digital mammograms" [0] and ran it against the tool [1] image by image. Results below, code here [2]: true_pos 36 true_neg 207 false_pos 63 false_neg 16 total 322 2) How is it true when the site [1] says "We will not store your data on our server. Please don't worry about any privacy issues." when you can find all analyzed mammograms under the "static" directory? http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mamo.jpg http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mamo.jpg http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mammo.jpg http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mammo.jpg (trying file names at random) [0] https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250394 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250394 [1] http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload [2] https://github.com/gregsadetsky/mias-check https://github.com/gregsadetsky/mias-check
- coolwulf 4y ago
  Thank you for your efforts for validation and I appreciate that. There is a script running in the background to auto clean the files in static folder every day.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    You just admitted you do store images. Also, you're serving up on http. Don't do that.
    - emteycz 4y ago
      They cache images.
      - vermilingua 4y ago
        I think caching people's sensitive medical history in a way that is publicly accessible is worth calling out; especially as it could be trivially fixed to maintain privacy.
        4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bitshaker 4y ago
This is impressive. Wonderful work to OP. I’m currently working with Digistain (S21) and we’re using AI to predict breast (and eventually other) cancer recurrence. The tests are performed using infrared spectroscopy to measure protein synthesis and then fed into AI in order to make proper measurements and predictions. We’ve shown we’re able to predict better than any other known method and are beginning our partnership and rollout to many hospitals around the world.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
I don't consider him an amateur programmer if he found that many GFX cards. Not amateur not "amateur" either. It's not the kind of thing that really gets called amateur. I'm a consummate algorithmist and have difficulty getting that amount hardware...for now at least. And he got them all of the same kind, that's pro. coolwulf is in fact cool.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
> As for why he doesn't commercialize the website and collect some money, this question was also asked by us. You don't get into open source development for the big bucks. It's sort of like asking someone who starts a soup kitchen why they don't open a restaurant. I think it's worth noting how open source development spurs technical innovation in a way commercial development does not. If a company develops a proprietary technology, almost nobody will get access to the source or datasets, and so it can't then be reused and built upon to advance the state of the art. If it's open source, everyone can build on it and improve things. Sort of like how science needs to be public in order to develop more science. But just as we need large investments to push science further, we should also have large investments in open source. We need to make access to these 50-GPU clusters easier for open source research, so a lone developer doesn't have to built it himself. Some meager funding for the actual development would be nice too... How many OSS researchers could we fund at $35K per?
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
henearkr 4y ago
This guy is the real role model of our field (computer science). Not a Steve Job, not an Elon Musk. Hao Jiang (Coolwulf) is who we should all aspirate to be. Fsck money already, we have the power to save live beings.
chrischen 4y ago
If anyone ever needs an example of how crypto is doing harm to the world: "Due to crypto mining, GPUs were in severe shortage and very over-priced on eBay" The over-valuation of crypto is a two-fold negative impact on society: a massive brain-drain sucking talented engineers who would otherwise be solving real problems, and the opportunity cost of GPUs burning electricity to run unintentional ponzi schemes instead of training deep learning models.
- cjblomqvist 4y ago
  You could argue the other way around. Crypto is creating market incentives to develop more powerful GPUs (for less $$$), which can make other applications possible. It's tricky to control market forces... (not that I'm a fan of crypto)
  - chrischen 4y ago
    Is it actually doing that though? The main mine-able crypto is Ethereum and I don't think Nvidia is specifically optimizing their consumer gaming GPUs for maximizing hashrates. The only innovation in this regard is their "mining" gpus which are the same thing as their normal GPUs just without physical video outputs. I'm not complaining about the market forces causing GPUs to be expensive, I'm complaining about the non-regulation of marketing these as securities to laymen, which is exactly what is happening right now every time you see an NFT or ICO ad on Facebook or Instagram. Wolf on Wall Street is a movie about this happening before in history, and the current craze around crypto is exactly the same thing and the reason why the qualified investor rules were made. If you stop dumb money being funneled into crypto, and stop the moral acceptance of chasing dumb money, you can free people to pursue more noble causes. I'm not anti crypto, but anyone can see that a good chunk, if not a majority, of current interest in crypto is due to chasing dumb money and greed. If I recall correctly Vitalik Buterin tweeted about this excess attention before. Bad attention could kill crypto before it can truly even get its feet off the ground.
    - cjblomqvist 4y ago
      It doesn't matter if the GPUs are optimized or not for crypto - I'd argue it's even better if it's not. The point is that Nvidia and AMD reach better economies of scale (which are critical for such R&D intensive businesses as cutting edge GPUs). That benefits all, if it goes in somewhat the right direction.
FounderBurr 4y ago
“Malicious mass”… “benign calcification”. Not appropriate to tell people they do or don’t have cancer based on a radiograph gpt guess. Also, can it tell the difference between a radiograph of a watermelon and a cancer filled breast? Prove it.
adultSwim 4y ago
I don't understand why this is useful. The starting point is a mammogram. Are there a lot of people who are able to get a mammogram performed, but not able to get it analyzed? I applaud the author. These tools seems like a great addition to health care providers. I'm just less sure about when you would use it directly as a patient.
- coolwulf 4y ago
  Let me try to explain: 1) Radiologists' experience on reading is not the same. The reading from a 5+ years experience radiologist sometime could be quite different from the one with a one or two years experience radiologist. As a matter of fact, due to the complicated issues with mammogram reading, some inexperienced radiologist don't get mammogram reading tasks when they started working in the clinics. 2) 2nd opinion sometime could be quite useful and important for the patients. By providing a utility for patients to have certain awareness on their mammogram, apart from the readings from their radiologists alone, could be useful, especially for people who are from remote area which lacks of experienced radiologists. 3) Even in big cities which has more medical resources (like big cities in China), due to the amount of patient, usually each radiologist only has about 30s to read a mammogram image (We have been told by multiple doctors and they could confirm that.). Mis-reading is very common due to the work-load. So a utility like this could help on finding or at lease warning doctors on possible missed. There are other reasoning behind this but above are things on top of my head right now.
chriszioutas 4y ago
great story kudos to the author etc. however from my knowledge reaching the 90 (although an amazing task) is not enough. I have been in contact with different researchers in similar domains and they were struggling for 96% and above. The difficulty in which you acquire those 1% after 90% is exponential and most hospitals/research facilities etc set a lower limit. 90% is by far not acceptable. Furthermore as others have mentioned, security etc play always a bit part. Having a doctor miss-read/miss the tumor etc can have legal actions etc. but having a machine do that is also not within the legal scope, there are so many aspects that need to be taken into consideration. Great effort especially for the person, but science wise not much.
dt123 4y ago
Imagine if all the GPU power that goes into crypto mining could be used on projects like this instead..
notme1234 4y ago
Very cool, but the desktop app for chest CT doesn't work - you can open an image but nothing get diagnosed. How is the algorithm differ from existing image classification algorithms?
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1143 points by coolwulf 4y ago

Recently a Chinese media interviewed me and I talked about a few side projects I have done in the past. I talked about the Neuralrad Mammo Screening project and Neuralrad multiple brain mets SRS platform. More awareness on radiation therapy to the general public will greatly help the community and we believe Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS) will eventually replace majority of the whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT) in the next five years. Here is the link to the original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7094940100450107935/ https://www.toutiao.com/article/7094940100450107935/

mamborambo 4y ago
Super impressed. Amateurs can and do play their parts in science --- there are numerous discoveries made in astronomy, mathematics, and definitely in computer applied sciences that sprang from the minds of amateurs.
sylware 4y ago
javascript only link. Any compatible link with noscript/basic (x)html browsers?
- jjeaff 4y ago
  And I would like the content sent to me in Morse code via telegraph.
  - fL0per 4y ago
    https://telegra.ph/This-amateur-programmer-once-used-50-1080Ti-cards-to-fight-cancer-05-21 https://telegra.ph/This-amateur-programmer-once-used-50-1080... There, it may content errors, since it's a machine translated copy what had to be telegraphed by the operator. Thank him, he's a brilliant guy.
ska 4y ago
WBRT is pretty brutal. Am I right in thinking you are focusing on multiple site treatment/palliative treatment of metastatic presentations? High site count also or sticking to say < 5?
- coolwulf 4y ago
  Exactly, I'm working on a workflow platform for multiple brain metastasis stereotactic radiosurgery. This will greatly benefit patients with more than 5 BMs.
  - ska 4y ago
    Cool stuff! I've done some work in adjacent areas - there are huge challenges (not only technical) but great to feel you are making an impact.
  - samstave 4y ago
    ELI5, please.
    - ska 4y ago
      Metastatic disease is when a cancer spreads to multiple locations. This can make it difficult/impossible/impractical to treat effectively, especially surgically. Whole brain radiotherapy works by killing everything a little bit in the hopes that the tumors die first (e.g. like chemo). There are good reasonswhy this tends to mostly-sort-of be true, but getting the balance right is hard and too much dose will definitely cause other problems. SRS is a way of targeting radiation directly to locations to kill cells, with less effective dose (hence damage) to other parts of the brain. It's all pretty harsh stuff, and you can die from the necrotic tissue caused by it, also. Often with this kind of disease you know you aren't going to cure someone, but you can get rid of symptoms and make people more comfortable (palliative care).
abfan1127 4y ago
Google Translate link - https://www-toutiao-com.translate.goog/article/7094940100450107935/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp&wid=1653064063070 https://www-toutiao-com.translate.goog/article/7094940100450...
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  Thanks -- and here's the site as well -- http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload
pen2l 4y ago
Oh, it's you! What a beacon of light and inspiration you are. Thanks for your work. That said, I welcome you to publish your work so it can become even better after a formalized peer-review process.
- coolwulf 4y ago
  For the multiple brain mets SRS project, we will be presenting at this year's AAPM annual meeting.
jacquesm 4y ago
Super effort. I understand your reluctance to accept funding but if you ever change your mind on that be sure to publish it here on HN. If giving you more tools means more progress in this domain without the usual red tape then I'm all for giving you as much of a push as possible.
- justinclift 4y ago
  As a general thought, it's super easy to start a Patreon account to accept donations. Seems pretty effective. :)
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Thank you for all you've done for people, it's amazing and inspiring!
hehepran 4y ago
Sir, you are super cool.
Billsen 4y ago
Nice job!
llaolleh 4y ago
Your story was inspirational. It's really cool to run this project to help others without expecting any payment.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Unless it's more expensive than existing treatments the medical industry will close the circles around you excluding you. That's why not one startup has hacked healthcare in America, not one. No breakaway successes making pharma cheaper. Like those incubators in Bangladesh, for premature babies not startups that is, those did OK. Some pill startups yes, but again that's an expensivification of medicine. If you can make medicine more expensive, they welcome you in! Jim Clark tried this, he was on a roll after Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Huge roll about as strong as Elon Musk as a serial entrepreneur. Then he targeted healthcare and couldn't do shit, just couldn't get anything to happen. He literally talked about getting "rid of all the assholes" by which he meant insurance and doctors and hospitals and middlemen and pharma and all the other "assholes" of that nature in his own words, but leave "only one asshole in the middle--us [paraphrased]." It's in a book. That book also talks about guys going on airplanes and chasing goats off cliffs, saying "Some people do this." Well the real structure of medicine isn't designed around the human body, it's designed around cornering the market. Market dominance. So of course it has this immune system against cost reduction and efficiencies--efficiencies especially--and you do know it lobbies, don't you? And can bribe the FDA like the Sacklers did? Or lobby the FDA, and then bribe underneath so when people see favoritism they think it's the over-the-counter placebo causing a placebo effect without suspecting an additional more potent under-the-table dosage of money. In case the administration has built up a tolerance to the over-the-counter stuff.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  What about the NHS in the UK? They should be more aligned to wanting cheaper cancer diagnosis and also anything to help people. If America has dysfunctional healthcare there is still the rest of the world. Which might be good for Americans eventually as the tech will come across one way or another.
  - anamax 4y ago
    > If America has dysfunctional healthcare there is still the rest of the world. Which might be good for Americans eventually as the tech will come across one way or another. Which raises the question - why does the vast majority of healthcare tech development come from the US? (I included "development" to get around the out-sourcing of testing to China.)
rob_c 4y ago
Fantastic work dude. On behalf of anyone who might one day benefit thanks and congrats.
jabrams2003 4y ago
What's the best way to contact you? I've been fighting brain cancer for 7 years and work closely with a group of neuro-oncologists, researchers, non-profits, and investors in the space. I'd love to chat.
- coolwulf 4y ago
  Feel free to send me emails: coolwulf@gmail.com
  - panabee 4y ago
    this is incredible. thanks. 1. do you have a patreon or something where people can support you? 2. do you know how to obtain the nucleotide sequences of c-MYC? 3. have you seen machine learning applications that can predict protein function? specifically, the goal is to predict if protein X could participate in cleaving of DNA similar to CRISPR Cas9? false positives are okay, provided the negatives are accurate (i.e., guarantees protein cannot cleave DNA like Cas9).
    - elmolino89 4y ago
      >do you know how to obtain the nucleotide sequences of c-MYC? Check: https://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Transcript/Summary?db=core;g=ENSG00000136997;r=8:127735434-127742951;t=ENST00000621592 https://www.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Transcript/Summary?db=c... This is the main transcript, the remaining 9 are in the table
      - panabee 4y ago
        thanks so much! would it be possible to contact you for other questions? or could you recommend a reddit sub for questions like this? researchgate doesn't seem responsive. for instance, how to obtain the nucleotide sequences for TP53, or for the NHN/RuvC domains of CRISPR Cas9? thanks again for your help.
        elmolino89 4y ago
rg111 4y ago
Hi. Some great projects. What's more commendable is your dedication towards your projects and seeing them through to end- to the point that they are actually useful. This is what I truly admire. I have a question for you. What is the tech stack that you use? And if it is not too much: What resources did you use to learn Deep Learning?
koprulusector 4y ago
> Recently a Chinese media interviewed me and I talked about a few side projects I have done in the past. I apologize if this has been asked and answered before, but do you speak Mandarin, or was the interview in English? Asking out of curiosity if it’s the former, and if so, how difficult was it to learn whilst also working on this and other things? And are there any resources or tips you might share that you found helpful?
- qzw 4y ago
  According to the article, Coolwulf went to Nanjing University for undergrad, so pretty safe to assume he would do an interview with Chinese media in Mandarin. And since he likely grew up in China, it was probably very easy for him to learn Mandarin indeed!
onetimeusename 4y ago
Where did you learn to program on distributed Nvidia GPUs? The article implied you were self taught and learning to do this is quite challenging for various reasons. Not least, Nvidia's documentation is not the best resource to learn from. This seems like quite a lot of work to understand ML and write custom CUDA code to get this to work. Do you have any insight about how you taught yourself these things and what tools you use?
- MaximumYComb 4y ago
  I'm not your OP but I learnt all these things at univeristy during my BCompSci. Understanding ML algorithms came down to a lot of math / statistics units. I learnt about parallel computing during a dedicated unit called "Distributed and Parallel Computing"
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Not the OP but I taught myself in a couple of weeks picking apart some of the sample CUDA code and reading some of the (excellent) pdfs on the architecture of the Nvidia range. At the time the GTX285 was hot stuff, the same code runs unchanged on a 1080ti and I would expect it to continue to work on even more modern incarnations. CUDA is pretty good as a platform to build on if you understand the basic idea behind the engine, and some low level experience will come in very handy. And ML on CUDA vs ML in C or some other language is typically a matter of shuttling the data and the results back and forth between main memory and the card as well as implementing the most time consuming portions of the algorithm you are using in a custom kernel, you can usually get 50% or so of the theoretical maximum speed with relatively little effort. Getting to full speed is going to be a lot harder, but then you could of course also add another card (or another three) get get an instant boost. Usually you would - nowadays at least - use someone else's optimized kernel + ML library but if you wanted to roll your own that's doable.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  Did coolwulf write his own CUDA code, or use machine learning libraries that already come with CUDA implementations, like TensorFlow or PySpark?
FpUser 4y ago
I am not a religious man at all but God Bless you. You are an amazing human being and a source of inspiration.
dclowd9901 4y ago
As a “professional” programmer, I’m humbled by your accomplishments. I really must find ways to contribute more to the world. It seems there’s a lot of opportunities in AI to do it.
iaw 4y ago
You're clearly well accomplished in multiple areas. How do approach learning something new?
sizzle 4y ago
Imagine for a moment if FB and Google took all their developers and resources and applied it to solving cancer, how long do you think it would take to make a dent in the problem space? Or is there a hard limit stopping us from progressive like Moores law for scientific understanding.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Yea… but instead, ads are like 3% more effective each year. So, you know, silver linings.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - NLPlatypus 4y ago
    Google does have a company Calico (California Life Corporation) (I’m hoping to work there after my PhD)
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      Sure if you are willing to ignore all evidence and instead go with a hopeful expectation of “doing good”.
- throwaway0220 4y ago
  > Imagine for a moment if FB and Google took all their developers and resources... It's a nice thought exercise, but of course not realistic. FAANGs wouldn't be able to attract or retain the talent if they were purely in scientific medical research (where do you think those fancy offices and fat paychecks comes from?). Having said that, it doesn't have to be either/or. I strongly believe that companies can be successful in balancing between thriving commercial businesses and using its profits to advance research that can benefit the society at large. Case in point: Google's DeepMind has for years published groundbreaking work in various areas including breast cancer research [1], protein folding [2], energy savings and climate change [3], and more. Also Calico [4], or its investments in health startups via GV, and of course all the well known services to users. What I'd like to see is more companies following a path where a portion of its profits is used to fund research in areas that can cause societal change for the better (which, in its turn, may eventually became new sources of revenue down the road - e.g. protein folding, self-driving cars). (disclaimer: Googler here, but no relationship with any of the projects mentioned) [1] https://www.deepmind.com/publications/international-evaluation-of-an-ai-system-for-breast-cancer-screening https://www.deepmind.com/publications/international-evaluati... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/22/1029973/deepmind-alphafold-protein-folding-biology-disease-drugs-proteome/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/22/1029973/deepmind... [3] https://www.deepmind.com/blog/real-world-challenges-for-agi https://www.deepmind.com/blog/real-world-challenges-for-agi [4] https://www.calicolabs.com/ https://www.calicolabs.com/
sdo72 4y ago
Thank you for doing this, you deserve a superhero badge! It's very inspirational.
nkzd 4y ago
You are an inspiration. Thank you for restoring my faith in this field.
Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
Sir, We've all been hearing that AI will revolutionize medical diagnostics for a long time, seen startups come & go in this space but seeing your work impact lives on the ground has convinced me that the secret missing ingredient was a self-less human who can build an accessible(non-commercial) solution for the masses. A decade ago I did a voluntary work on a simple app for oral cancer detection(questionnaire, data-entry) with an oncologist, Who used it to for survey in the tribal regions of India and he used to say how lack of early detection is the number one reason for so many deaths(many die without knowing that they had cancer). He's now settled in Germany, But I would still pass this story to him & perhaps his colleagues in India could make use of it. Thank you.
rawgabbit 4y ago
You are a hero. God bless you and thank you for efforts to help others.
adultSwim 4y ago
Great work. I'm inspired seeing others use their skills to work on something important. So many of the smartest, most well educated engineers of my generation have put their talents to use doing things that are of little value to society. Thank you for demonstrating to us what else is possible.

ska 4y ago

It's an interesting subject, with a long history; I think many of the biggest challenges are not technical. The first commercially available AI/ML approach to breast cancer screening was available (US) in the late 90s. There have been many iterations and some improvements since, none of which really knock it out of the park but most clinical radiologists see the value. Perhaps the more interesting question then is why are people getting value out of uploading their own scans, i.e. why does their standard care path not already include this?

coolwulf 4y ago
The reason I made this project 100% free and available to the general public is to help patients, especially in the remote area who has limited access to experienced radiologists for diagnosis, to at least get a second opinion on their mammogram. And I think this has certain value and this is why I'm doing this project. Hao
- ska 4y ago
  Inconsistent care is a really good point. I wasn't trying to be negative - hope it didn't come across that way. I was hoping to point out that systemic issues in health care management, at least in a lot of countries, seems to be more of a problem that tech for things like this. Out of curiosity, how are you handling the data access and labelling issues here? I suspect that's the key issue that has limited the performance of the commercial offerings (hardly limited to this problem or this space). OTOH in terms of real impact, properly leveraging a more modestly successful algorithm will probably help more people than getting a few more %. With the (strong) caveat that in a space like this you really have to look at work-up rate and balance risks.
- monkeydust 4y ago
  There is history of breast cancer in my family and anything that can be done to improve outcomes has to be highly commended. I did however have the same question and this > to at least get a second opinion on their mammogram. for me makes a lot of sense, even in developed countries where you get a result but want extra assurances. It would be interesting to know (assuming you have the data, even anecdotally) if the second opinions using this overturned professional ones and from those how many were corrected an original false negative mistake.

transfire 4y ago

Sadly, this would be illegal in the USA and get shut down pretty quickly.

giantg2 4y ago
More like a patent holder would usurp all the work someone else did and make a fortune off of it after taking 5 years to get through the red tape.
- markus92 4y ago
  Na, this is all well-known work. This field is seriously big, lots of publications on it dating back to the early '90s.
renewiltord 4y ago
unlessI'm wrong, he's in Michigan.
- charia 4y ago
  OP is probably talking about the legality of American hospitals using this software in an official capacity like some Chinese hospitals seem to be doing. I'm completely unfamiliar, but it wouldn't surprise me if for diagnosing? software like this to be used in an official medical capacity in America it would need to go through some sort of particular vetting process because if it isn't it might leave hospitals who use it open to lawsuits.
  - caycep 4y ago
    that would be a potential YC idea. A company that enables smaller groups to do clinical research w/o needing an army of people to wade through the regulatory red tape. That also isn't in and of itself a giant predatory CRO type organization.
    - dekhn 4y ago

pentium 4y ago

way cool, no need to label yourself amateur, software, hardware, radiology, and real impact. Hats off to you.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

What a service to society. Hats off to you to using your skills like that!

Hitton 4y ago

Is this machine translated? Some parts don't make much sense.

oversocialized 4y ago

ArtixFox 4y ago

did they win?

tfgg 4y ago

What peer review or regulatory approval process has this been through? Seems pretty irresponsible -- there are many notorious pitfalls encountered with ML for medical imaging. You shouldn't play with people's lives.

mromanuk 4y ago
This is like taking your temperature at home, are you making a diagnostic yourself? Not quite. But you can know some symptoms and take action (going to the doctor) maybe with less anxiety edit: grammar
- Thaxll 4y ago
  What's the chance of taking the wrong temperature though?
  - mordae 4y ago
    Pretty high, actually.
- tfgg 4y ago
  Thermometers are well understood, simple devices, and there are other complementary checks (e.g. does my forehead feel hot) if they fail. This project might lead to people thinking they're in the clear and not seek appropriate medical treatment, or be overtreated due to an error. You should always talk to a qualified doctor if you're concerned about your health, and not use projects like these for decision making.
  - arbitrandomuser 4y ago
    I don't see how a passive scan like this can be harmful . Ofcourse if it does show a positive one should confirm further with a biopsy or other standard confirmation diagnostic. As for false negatives... If you feel something is wrong you should get it checked thoroughly anyway .

light_hue_1 4y ago

As an AI/ML researcher who publishes in this area regularly, I will be using this as a case study for AI ethics classes. That this is allowed to go on is shocking. > In 2018, a programmer named “coolwulf” started a thread about a website he had made. Users just need to upload their X-ray images, then they can let AI to carry out their own fast diagnosis of breast cancer disease. Literally the worst fears that we have as a community is that people will recklessly apply ML to things like cancer screening on open websites and cause countless deaths, bankruptcies, needless procedures, etc. How many people went to this website, uploaded images, were told were ok and didn't follow up? How many were told they have cancer and insisted on procedures they didn't need? The website is totally unaccountable. Totally unregulated. Totally without any of the most basic ethical standards in medicine. Without even the most basic human rights for patients. This is frankly disgusting. In the US this would have been shut down by the FDA immediately. We should not be celebrating this unethical "science" that doesn't meet even the most basic of scientific standards or ethical standards. I can't believe this is getting upvoted here.

karolist 4y ago
I share your sentiment, people are focusing on successes too much but not scrutinise what potential outcomes false negatives in software like this can have.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  This is unimaginably worse than what Theranos did!
coolwulf 4y ago
Thank you for your reply. On the site, it's cleared marked and noted this is not for diagnosis. "This tool is only to provide you with the awareness of breast mammogram, not for diagnosis."
- analyte123 4y ago
  The words “found malicious mass”, disclaimer or not, could be considered a diagnosis. You can probably say “anomaly”, or maybe even “classified as malicious mass”. With you having connections in the US, it is probably worth talking to an expert if you want to keep this online. Also, 50 GPUs seems like more than necessary!

1-6 4y ago

Goes to show that you don’t need to be a long time programmer to have impact in most areas of society. Why is Python so good? It democratizes by lowering the bar to coding.

somethoughts 4y ago

Admittedly I just skimmed the article but I feel like the title should be more - "This "amateur" medical...". His primary expertise is more physics/CS/programmer related than it is human biology/medicine.

OJFord 4y ago

'Amateur' oughtn't be scare-quoted because it's not a slur, many of the finest programmers were amateurs for many years before they were old enough to be given a job in the profession.

ant6n 4y ago
If u used to be a paid software programmer and got a different job, but continued doing programming side projects without pay, are u an amateur or not?
- NHQ 4y ago
  It literally means "for the love".
- Wohlf 4y ago
  Yes, but you'd also be a former professional. Amateur also isn't meant to be a negative term, it just means you do it as a hobby rather than as a profession.
jxramos 4y ago
I had an art teacher affectionately remind me the etymology for amateur > borrowed from French, going back to Middle French, "one who loves, lover," borrowed from Latin amātor "lover, enthusiastic admirer, devotee," from amāre "to have affection for, love, be in love, make love to" (of uncertain origin) + -tōr-, -tor, agent suffix https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amateur#etymology-anchor https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amateur#etymology... changes the feeling of it all when you get that context, someone who loves a subject pretty much--no qualifications skill wise or regarding depth but they love it and should presumably take things seriously to some degree as any lover would.
gist 4y ago
Using 'amateur' (quoted or not) is click bait. It's an embellishment to the rest of the headline. For that matter even though it's true the graphics cards are as well. Only thing that could have made it more click bait would be to also put in AI in the headline.

vmception 4y ago

> In short, it is to let the AI help you "look at the film", and the accuracy rate is almost comparable to professional doctors, and it is completely free. In the US, the issue is getting the Xray

themantalope 4y ago

This is very cool work. I'm a radiologist, I also work on developing ML/AI based systems for cancer detection and characterization. Literally just took a break for a few minutes from creating some labels and saw this as the top HN post! I think in some ways making the model available online can be good, but in other ways could be harmful too. Very complicated topic. 恭喜coolwulf，祝你继续成功。

martincmartin 4y ago
How could it be harmful? Is it just because of errors, i.e. false negative means person won't talk to doctor and won't be caught early; false positive means needless worry, maybe tarnish more general medical industry? Or something else?
- dekhn 4y ago
  The consequences are false positives and negatives in cancer detection are well known (easily googled), and are actually extremely important when looking at cancer treatment in large populations. You nailed the most important ones.
- themantalope 4y ago
  Yeah, those are part of the issue. For example on the webpage, there is no discussion about the false negative/positive rate of the system, and no comparison or link to an academic paper that compares the performance of the system to a trained breast radiologist. Does a patient take a negative exam as "I'm good!" and forego actually seeing a doctor, or having the exam read by a radiologist? A positive result is also a challenging situation. I've talked to patients before after diagnosing them, and as you could expect most people are shocked, scared or they want to know what they should do next. In breast radiology specifically (at least in the US) there is a well defined reporting lexicon and classification system. From what I can tell, the system does not use the lexicon or BI-RADS classification. https://www.acr.org/-/media/ACR/Files/RADS/BI-RADS/BIRADS-Reference-Card.pdf https://www.acr.org/-/media/ACR/Files/RADS/BI-RADS/BIRADS-Re... Breast cancer can be very subtle, and can be hard to figure out, especially if a patient has had surgery or other benign abnormalities. https://radiopaedia.org/cases/development-of-dcis?case_id=development-of-dcis&lang=us https://radiopaedia.org/cases/development-of-dcis?case_id=de... Diagnostic and screening images also undergo rigorous QA for the entire system. Does the model have some kind of QA built in? There is a just a small disclaimer at the top that says "we will not store your data on the server. please do not worry about privacy issues". Not exactly a formal or legal binding agreement. In fact, you can't even connect over https. http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload These are just a few things that come to mind off the top of my head. Like I said before, I do think that what coolwulf works on and is trying to do is good, and in the long run can help doctors better characterize findings and help patients. But like anything in health care, there are a lot of edge cases and side effects that you have to think about. The stakes are also very high.

latchkey 4y ago

ETH will soon move from PoW to PoS (let's not debate the timeline or if it is a good idea). This will put about 32 million GPUs worth of compute and millions of CPUs searching for something else to do (or just flood the market with used equipment). I have been searching, for years, for alternative workloads for these GPUs beyond just PoW mining and password cracking. Many of them are on systems with tiny cpus, little memory, little disk, little networking so the options are heavily limited. AI/ML/Rendering/Gaming actually make bad use cases. If anyone has thoughts on this, I'd appreciate hearing them. Let it all die is certainly an option, but it also seems just as wasteful as keeping it going. Maybe we can find a better use case, like somehow curing cancer...

mwt 4y ago
Folding@home would love to take a swing at a sliver of that compute
- jseliger 4y ago
  It's peculiar to me that Folding@home never managed to get GPUs working for MacOS, given the platform's popularity: https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=32895 https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=32895 As a consequence, it seems not worth installing on MacOS: https://stats.foldingathome.org/os https://stats.foldingathome.org/os
  - dekhn 4y ago
    It's not worth implementing for MacOS because it woulnd't increase the overall folding rate very much given the relative weakness of the Mac GPUs compared to the existing f@h fleet.
zamadatix 4y ago
There are plenty of good uses, projects like BOINC have been using GPUs for good for over a decade. The problem is the incentive system disappears, it's a lot easier to get people to run 32 million GPUs when it makes them money instead of costs them money.

jonplackett 4y ago

Is 90% correct rate considered good enough for this kind of use? Seems like 1/10 wrong would be bad, how does that compare with a doctor doing it?

latortuga 4y ago
According to the American Cancer Society > About half of the women getting annual mammograms over a 10-year period will have a false-positive finding at some point.
- jonplackett 4y ago
  Thanks. Any idea what the false negative is? I guess that’s the more important factor?
  - Zacharias030 4y ago
    The american screening system has very high rates of recalls to further examination (around 2-4x higher than good european screening systems). In Germany, roughly 20-25% of cancers are missed in screening (and often found 2 years later)
Zacharias030 4y ago
The 90% accuracy figure in the article unfortunately exposes the author as very ignorant. On a German breast cancer screening population, 90% accuracy is abysmal as ~99.2% of cases are negative. Just predicting „no cancer“ would achieve 99.2% accuracy. Accuracy is a very bad metric for such highly asymmetric problems. To provide some context: The German screening system is able to identify cancer in ~6/1000 of patients screened, and missing it for the remaining 2/1000. IIRC this is achieved by re-inviting in ~3% of cases to further examination, where ultrasound / needle biopsy / etc. can be done on a case by case basis.

725686 4y ago

For an evolutionary perspective of cancer and possible new ways to treat them, I recommend the new book "The cheating cell" by Athena Aktipis.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

>> Furthermore, the accuracy of tumor identification has reached 90%. How is this accuracy calculated? Further in the article it is noted that there is no patient data saved by the project: >> He said that he’s not sure actually how many people have used it because the data is not saved on the server due to patient privacy concerns. But during that time, he received a lot of thank-you emails from patients, many of them from China. Considering user privacy is laudable in my opinion, but I'm still curious to know how accuracy is known.

Iv 4y ago
Probably based on a test set from the original dataset.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  The expression "has reached" makes it sound more like an extrinsinc evaluation process has taken place (i.e. not on a test set).

notfed 4y ago

What does "90% accuracy" mean? Is this before or after applying Bayes' theorem?

coolwulf 4y ago
At the time of this model / work developed (late 2017 / early 2018), very few public mammogram datasets were available. So the model was trained on DDSM/MIAS and tested on InBreast dataset. The 90% accuracy was calculated with results on InBreast dataset.

westcort 4y ago

My key takeaways: * The free AI breast cancer detection website took coolwulf about three months of spare time, sometime he had to sleep in his office to get things done, before the site finally went live in 2018 * The website also gained a lot of attention from the industry, during which many domestic and foreign medical institutions, such as Fudan University Hospital, expressed their gratitude to him by email and were willing to provide financial and technical support * Afterwards, he and Weiguo Lu, now a tenured professor at University of Texas Southwest Medical Center, founded two software companies targeting the radiotherapy and started working on product development for cancer radiotherapy and artificial intelligence technologies * But in 2022, he returned with an even more important "brain cancer project" * coolwulf (Hao Jiang) (right) He told us that his parents are not medical professionals, and his interest in programming was fostered from a young age * A reliable AI for tumor detection can enable a large number of patients who cannot seek adequate medical diagnosis in time to know the condition earlier or provide a secondary opinion * He said that he’s not sure actually how many people have used it because the data is not saved on the server due to patient privacy concerns Link to the technology: http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/ http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/

ramraj07 4y ago
> A reliable AI for tumor detection can enable a large number of patients who cannot seek adequate medical diagnosis in time to know the condition earlier or provide a secondary opinion Citation Required?
dekhn 4y ago
that's an unadorned http link. Really?

redeyedtreefrog 4y ago

In the UK the NHS don't do screening for breast cancer for under 50s because it's believed that it would do more harm than good by leading to unnecessary treatment for cancers that would never have actually caused any harm, and even where no treatment is carried out it causes great distress. Though there are arguments that the age cut off is too high, and should be set at 40. The above is with regard to a well-funded and regulated screening program that presumably has much better precision/recall than this website. I wonder what the cut off age is for this website before the diagnoses cause more harm than good? 60? 70? This is getting lots of upvotes because it's confirmation bias for the large segment of HN readers who believe that problems would easily be solved by a small number of brilliant technologists, if only it weren't for governments and big organisations with all their rules and regulations.

laingc 4y ago
A lot of people, including myself, don’t believe that central health authorities have the right to make that call. Moreover, I personally don’t have confidence in their ability to make those kinds of decisions, and I believe the abysmal performance of the NHS supports my view.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  I share your disdain for a central authority in making these judgement calls, but I have even less confidence in the majority of people who think they can solve everything with AI. Signed, a data scientist with a PhD in biomedical engineering.
- Gatsky 4y ago
  The NHS has finite resources. They have to decide if implementing a screening program is worthwhile or not, versus spending the money elsewhere. You can still go to your doctor and get a mammogram (or even a more useful test) if you have other reasons why this might be justified in your situation. They aren’t ‘banning’ mammograms for young women.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago

ghoomketu 4y ago

Reading this article only makes me realise how crypto industry has crippled the progress independent researchers like this would badly need gpus for AI. How many really useful, cool and meaningful projects are stuck because such authors can't find or afford gpus - as they are being used to calculate meaningless hashes instead :/

green-salt 4y ago

Amazing work. I'm glad this is going to help so many people.

gregsadetsky 4y ago

1) I just downloaded the "The Mammographic Image Analysis Society database of digital mammograms" [0] and ran it against the tool [1] image by image. Results below, code here [2]: true_pos 36 true_neg 207 false_pos 63 false_neg 16 total 322 2) How is it true when the site [1] says "We will not store your data on our server. Please don't worry about any privacy issues." when you can find all analyzed mammograms under the "static" directory? http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mamo.jpg http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mamo.jpg http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mammo.jpg http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/static/mammo.jpg (trying file names at random) [0] https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250394 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/250394 [1] http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload http://mammo.neuralrad.com:5300/upload [2] https://github.com/gregsadetsky/mias-check https://github.com/gregsadetsky/mias-check

coolwulf 4y ago
Thank you for your efforts for validation and I appreciate that. There is a script running in the background to auto clean the files in static folder every day.
- dekhn 4y ago
  You just admitted you do store images. Also, you're serving up on http. Don't do that.
  - emteycz 4y ago
    They cache images.
    - vermilingua 4y ago
      I think caching people's sensitive medical history in a way that is publicly accessible is worth calling out; especially as it could be trivially fixed to maintain privacy.
      - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bitshaker 4y ago

This is impressive. Wonderful work to OP. I’m currently working with Digistain (S21) and we’re using AI to predict breast (and eventually other) cancer recurrence. The tests are performed using infrared spectroscopy to measure protein synthesis and then fed into AI in order to make proper measurements and predictions. We’ve shown we’re able to predict better than any other known method and are beginning our partnership and rollout to many hospitals around the world.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

I don't consider him an amateur programmer if he found that many GFX cards. Not amateur not "amateur" either. It's not the kind of thing that really gets called amateur. I'm a consummate algorithmist and have difficulty getting that amount hardware...for now at least. And he got them all of the same kind, that's pro. coolwulf is in fact cool.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

> As for why he doesn't commercialize the website and collect some money, this question was also asked by us. You don't get into open source development for the big bucks. It's sort of like asking someone who starts a soup kitchen why they don't open a restaurant. I think it's worth noting how open source development spurs technical innovation in a way commercial development does not. If a company develops a proprietary technology, almost nobody will get access to the source or datasets, and so it can't then be reused and built upon to advance the state of the art. If it's open source, everyone can build on it and improve things. Sort of like how science needs to be public in order to develop more science. But just as we need large investments to push science further, we should also have large investments in open source. We need to make access to these 50-GPU clusters easier for open source research, so a lone developer doesn't have to built it himself. Some meager funding for the actual development would be nice too... How many OSS researchers could we fund at $35K per?

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

henearkr 4y ago

This guy is the real role model of our field (computer science). Not a Steve Job, not an Elon Musk. Hao Jiang (Coolwulf) is who we should all aspirate to be. Fsck money already, we have the power to save live beings.

chrischen 4y ago

If anyone ever needs an example of how crypto is doing harm to the world: "Due to crypto mining, GPUs were in severe shortage and very over-priced on eBay" The over-valuation of crypto is a two-fold negative impact on society: a massive brain-drain sucking talented engineers who would otherwise be solving real problems, and the opportunity cost of GPUs burning electricity to run unintentional ponzi schemes instead of training deep learning models.

cjblomqvist 4y ago
You could argue the other way around. Crypto is creating market incentives to develop more powerful GPUs (for less $$$), which can make other applications possible. It's tricky to control market forces... (not that I'm a fan of crypto)
- chrischen 4y ago
  Is it actually doing that though? The main mine-able crypto is Ethereum and I don't think Nvidia is specifically optimizing their consumer gaming GPUs for maximizing hashrates. The only innovation in this regard is their "mining" gpus which are the same thing as their normal GPUs just without physical video outputs. I'm not complaining about the market forces causing GPUs to be expensive, I'm complaining about the non-regulation of marketing these as securities to laymen, which is exactly what is happening right now every time you see an NFT or ICO ad on Facebook or Instagram. Wolf on Wall Street is a movie about this happening before in history, and the current craze around crypto is exactly the same thing and the reason why the qualified investor rules were made. If you stop dumb money being funneled into crypto, and stop the moral acceptance of chasing dumb money, you can free people to pursue more noble causes. I'm not anti crypto, but anyone can see that a good chunk, if not a majority, of current interest in crypto is due to chasing dumb money and greed. If I recall correctly Vitalik Buterin tweeted about this excess attention before. Bad attention could kill crypto before it can truly even get its feet off the ground.
  - cjblomqvist 4y ago
    It doesn't matter if the GPUs are optimized or not for crypto - I'd argue it's even better if it's not. The point is that Nvidia and AMD reach better economies of scale (which are critical for such R&D intensive businesses as cutting edge GPUs). That benefits all, if it goes in somewhat the right direction.

FounderBurr 4y ago

“Malicious mass”… “benign calcification”. Not appropriate to tell people they do or don’t have cancer based on a radiograph gpt guess. Also, can it tell the difference between a radiograph of a watermelon and a cancer filled breast? Prove it.

adultSwim 4y ago

I don't understand why this is useful. The starting point is a mammogram. Are there a lot of people who are able to get a mammogram performed, but not able to get it analyzed? I applaud the author. These tools seems like a great addition to health care providers. I'm just less sure about when you would use it directly as a patient.

coolwulf 4y ago
Let me try to explain: 1) Radiologists' experience on reading is not the same. The reading from a 5+ years experience radiologist sometime could be quite different from the one with a one or two years experience radiologist. As a matter of fact, due to the complicated issues with mammogram reading, some inexperienced radiologist don't get mammogram reading tasks when they started working in the clinics. 2) 2nd opinion sometime could be quite useful and important for the patients. By providing a utility for patients to have certain awareness on their mammogram, apart from the readings from their radiologists alone, could be useful, especially for people who are from remote area which lacks of experienced radiologists. 3) Even in big cities which has more medical resources (like big cities in China), due to the amount of patient, usually each radiologist only has about 30s to read a mammogram image (We have been told by multiple doctors and they could confirm that.). Mis-reading is very common due to the work-load. So a utility like this could help on finding or at lease warning doctors on possible missed. There are other reasoning behind this but above are things on top of my head right now.

chriszioutas 4y ago

great story kudos to the author etc. however from my knowledge reaching the 90 (although an amazing task) is not enough. I have been in contact with different researchers in similar domains and they were struggling for 96% and above. The difficulty in which you acquire those 1% after 90% is exponential and most hospitals/research facilities etc set a lower limit. 90% is by far not acceptable. Furthermore as others have mentioned, security etc play always a bit part. Having a doctor miss-read/miss the tumor etc can have legal actions etc. but having a machine do that is also not within the legal scope, there are so many aspects that need to be taken into consideration. Great effort especially for the person, but science wise not much.

dt123 4y ago

Imagine if all the GPU power that goes into crypto mining could be used on projects like this instead..

notme1234 4y ago

Very cool, but the desktop app for chest CT doesn't work - you can open an image but nothing get diagnosed. How is the algorithm differ from existing image classification algorithms?

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