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Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

extremetech.com

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Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#11

Post by ippisl »

mrsebastian wrote: post #4
allenp wrote: post #3

"...but imagine if you had a C-Path machine in every town or city." How near-sighted of the author. An article about computer vision, AI, machine learning, and no thoughts of tele-pathology or remote reading?

hat tip My thought was that such such a machine would basically have a built-in, automated biopsy thing. Like, the machine really would do everything from taking a biopsy, looking at the sample, and then diagnosing. Tele-pathology is cool, but you still need to get the tissue sample somehow -- which I imagine is hard in a town/village without a hospital. You could have some kind of automated biopsy unit that then sen…

There's an indian company selling biopsy helper robots. it robots simplify the process and enable technicians to take the biopsy instead of doctors, and the whole process is faster.

see : http://www.perfinthealthcare.com/Procedure_Videos.html

Looking at the videos , it seems that the whole process can be done by robot, But maybe patients and other stakeholders feel this way is safer/more economical.

Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#12

Post by davidhansen »

This does not address the issue of feature detection, but it's interesting nonetheless, inasmuch as well-trained human doctors are quite bad at probability, with the specific case of breast cancer diagnoses. The first 1/8th or so of Eliezer's layman's Bayes document:

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#15

Post by bh42222 »

This should not be surprising for anyone who understand software. And software identifying breast and skin and other cancers is going to continue getting better.

Now the bad news is that human medicine moves super slowly due to very strict regulations, and I expect doctors to resist this.

I hate to say this, but I think health insurance companies are our best hope to push this technology into greater use.

Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#16

Post by 2mur »

I'm a pathologist and an avocational programmer. This is pretty neat material and is very relevant to me, as I have been trying to bone up my math chops with Khan Academy videos so that I can tackle some computer vision related work in pathology.

With regards to the study, I will just point out that the system is not diagnosing breast carcinoma, but rather is producing a score which reflects the prognosis as relates to overall survival of the patient (so it is not as impressive as the somewhat hyperbolic HN title makes it out to be... a better title would be 'Stanford computer analyzes breast cancer more accurately than human doctor' which is not surprising at all given the well-documented interobserver variability in breast cancer scoring, particularly in moderately-differentiated tumors). That is to say that the computer already knows the tissue that it is looking at is a tumor and not benign breast tissue. Furthermore, it is really only providing a histologic (or morphologic) score, which is to say, that it is attempting to predict how aggressive the tumor will behave based upon how well or not well it is differentiated (how ugly it is). These days, this score is actually less useful in clinical practice than other information such as whether or not the tumor cells are expressing estrogen/progesterone hormone receptors, or if it is over-expressing Her2-neu protein, as these are possible paths for cancer therapy (anti-estrogen drugs vs. Herceptin) in addition to being prognostic indicators (tumors which express ER/PR generally behave better than tumors which are ER/PR negative and express Her2), as well as the stage (or how far the cancer has already spread) at the time the patient is diagnosed. There are a bunch of companies which are getting FDA approval for computer vision related algorithms for scoring immunohistochemical assays for ER/PR/Her2 [1].

So I am actually far less concerned about a computer doing my job very well, which is actually looking at a piece of tissue on a slide and making a tumor versus not-tumor distinction. This is very hard to do and I think will continue to be even harder for computers/computer-vision/AI to do for a long time to come. I am far more concerned about molecular diagnostics. That is the true-future for making cancer determinations and may even eliminate the part of my job where I tell you if something is benign vs. malignant.

[1] http://www.aperio.com/pathology-services/analyze-slides-auto...

Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#17

Post by roentgen »

separated wrote: post #14

The funny thing is, most rads physicians would probably welcome this, as mammography is often the least preferred sub-specialty (my wife is a radiologist and feels this way, and I've encountered many radiologists with the same outlook).

The system in this article is not interpreting mammograms, which is something that radiologists do. This is looking at tissue samples on slides, the domain of pathologists.

Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#18

Post by signa11 »

melling wrote: post #8

You can learn from some of the experts in the field: http://ai-class.com - Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun http://ml-class.com - Andrew Ng I signed up 4 weeks into Andrew's class. Both of these are excellent. Btw, the technique in the article is a classification problem, right? :-)

a multiclass-classification but yes. i am enrolled as well ;)

Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#19

Post by danso »

This kind of development is not that new, conceptually, at least (obviously, implementing it is another thing). One of the most consistently verified themes of study is that human experts can be very inconsistent, and in some cases, expertise can be a detriment when it leads to overconfidence. Radiologists, for example, have been found 20% of the time to render two different verdicts when looking at the same X-ray at two different times.

And of course there's the recent study showing how judges were consistently more likely to deny parole during hearings that happen in the afternoon: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...

Re: Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor

#20

Post by bh42222 »

2mur wrote: post #16

I'm a pathologist and an avocational programmer. This is pretty neat material and is very relevant to me, as I have been trying to bone up my math chops with Khan Academy videos so that I can tackle some computer vision related work in pathology. With regards to the study, I will just point out that the system is not diagnosing breast carcinoma, but rather is producing a score which reflects the prognosis as relates…

So I am actually far less concerned about a computer doing my job very well, which is actually looking at a piece of tissue on a slide and making a tumor versus not-tumor distinction. This is very hard to do and I think will continue to be even harder for computers/computer-vision/AI to do for a long time to come.

Can you elaborate?

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