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Light-based technique shows 90% accuracy in early prostate cancer detection
- theGnuMe 2y agothe paper is at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-63816-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-63816-z Pretty amazing if it pans out.
- chrisweekly 2y agoGreat news, if it holds up!
- Mistletoe 2y agoLike reading tea leaves but dried blood and it seems to work.
- petermcneeley 2y agoBiopsy's have their own risks.
- thinkingkong 2y agoSuch as?
- tomcam 2y agoSometimes piercing a tumor can spread cancer cells
- mapkkk 2y agoThe article mentions that their method relies on blood sampling rather than biopsy, however I concede to the verity of your comment.
- melling 2y agoNon-invasive detection and a non-invasive cure with focused ultrasound We’re slowly getting there: https://www.fusfoundation.org/diseases-and-conditions/prostate-cancer/ https://www.fusfoundation.org/diseases-and-conditions/prosta...
- ecuaflo 2y ago“Focused ultrasound is a noninvasive, radiation-free method to destroy prostate tissue and treat prostate disease.” Acoustic/thermal radiation is still radiation.
- melling 2y agoI thought ultrasound worked by cavitation. It’s mechanical not thermal. It’s already approved for small liver tumors: https://histosonics.com/the-science/ https://histosonics.com/the-science/
- willy_k 2y agoIt’s kinda thermal, the ‘radiation’ is ultrasound sound waves but the friction from the mechanical forces induced does cause heat
- dahart 2y agoSure, lots of things radiate, but the meaning is clear, no? The word ‘radiation’ without a qualifier or in a medical context is generally understood to refer to EM & particle radiation, such as x-rays, gamma rays, etc.
- mmmBacon 2y agoWhen people say radiation free they are generally referring to ionizing radiation. This has been a well known convention for a century.
- hansvm 2y agoThe other answers are currently just appealing to common definitions, but belaboring the point a bit further there's a real difference. Imagine you hold your hand 1/4 inch above an electric stove on high. What do you expect to happen? You're pumping 1kw into your hand, so probably nothing good. What you don't expect from a duration of a minute or two though is much in the way of DNA damage. You'll mostly recover, give or take a bit of scarring and lower-probability acute health risks (even that scarring degrading to nothing over time if you're young). Contrast that with 1000x less power (just 1 watt), but in the form of a focused x-ray. It can't affect many tissues, but the energy in each photon breaks chemical bonds the stove couldn't dream of in thousands of years. When using it as a diagnostic tool or a treatment, the best you can hope to do is mitigate the blast radius. Some therapies are, by that definition, a bit of a hybrid. Binding nanoparticles to a tumor to excite them with near-infrared energy is pretty clearly a form of radiation, but the technique uses those wavelengths because they mostly just pass through your tissues and because it's easy to tune nanoparticles in those wavelengths. The effect on your body (beyond any cytotoxic effects of the particles) is a localized thermal treatment. This new treatment is both non-radiative definitionally (using something other than the electromagnetic spectrum), but it fits into that last group of things, as a way to focus energy into problematic cells without letting stray high-energy particles cause excessive damage. Damage is limited to local thermal stresses, with probably some unknown unknowns with respect to cavitation inside blood vessels.
- dagurp 2y agoAs someone with a BRCA2 mutation this is very promising news.
- tiffanyh 2y agoDumb question: does "90% accuracy" mean - "of the cancers it detected, it was 90% correct"? Or does it mean, "of all the patients who developed cancer, it detected 90% of them"? Where the later is referring to the entire population, and the former is only about those detected.
- vostok 2y agoI really like the table of confusion as a way to look at this stuff. I find the terminology somewhat confusing and it's much easier for me to just look up the formulas. That means 90% accuracy should mean (true_positive + true_negative)/(whole_population) == 90%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_matrix
- diffeomorphism 2y agoSo a trivial test that always says "No" will have better accuracy? https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/prostate-cancer/about/key-statistics.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/prostate-cancer/about/ke... > About 1 in 8 men will get diagnosed with that cancer, through their whole lifetime. So true_negative/whole_population>=87.5% at least (life time vs currently has cancer). Or am I misunderstanding the meaning?
- greenavocado 2y agoThis is why accuracy is useless for reasoning about detection of rare things.
- _Microft 2y agoBeside the already linked-to article on the confusion matrix, you can also have a look at the one on sensitivity and specificity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity