I coauthored a paper a few years ago on the intra-observer variability of measurements of brain tumors when using the bidimensional product. An increase of 25% in the BP is taken as an indicator of brain tumor progression. We found that the intra-observer variability is so high, you can get that 25% increase purely by chance. The first recommendation of the medical team, to wait and see, is understandable.
That is a shocking thing to say. If they had followed the wait and see approach there's a good chance she might be blind right now. This high-handedness is why I have such a hard time with the medical profession.
Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#42> Balzer used Photoshop to layer the new DICOM files on top of the old images, and realized that the tumor hadn’t grown at all — the radiologist had just measured from a different point on the image. Think about the some of the implications of that statement for a while. It really is no wonder that the softer sciences have a reproducibility problem.
The next biggest problem is that there's a gold standard of treatment, and it's hard to get enough research to move the gold standard. In this case, the gold standard is essentially a diameter measurement, based on picking the visibly largest slice of a data set which happens to have an axis determined by the patient's somewhat random orientation in the CT scanner. Axial, Coronal, Sagittal. Those are not perfect, anatomical orientations - they're rough. Most radiologists won't take the time to create Multi-Planar Reformats along oblique or double-oblique angles. And even if they did, they'd still be eye-balling the measurement.
It's not very hard from a regulatory standpoint to create tools to allow a radiologist to click here, click there, and show a measurement of distance. Then the radiologist can look at a similar measurement from a different radiologist on the previous scan, and say whether it's bigger or smaller now. (But some PACS still don't handle anisotropic MPR correctly, which just blows my mind.)
It's vastly harder from a regulatory standpoint to say in a medical product for commercial use, "Hey, we automatically measured the volume of this tumor by automatically finding the boundary of the tissue and automatically ignoring the connected blood vessels and neighboring bone, and then we automatically found the largest cross-sectional diameter, and then we automatically compared the same measurements against the automatically non-linearly-registered longitudinal previous scan... diagnosis: the tumor is not growing, just changing shape slightly."
People think their CT scans are examined for hours by a team of doctors, like on "House." In reality, you're lucky if your CT scan gets 5 minutes of investigation, and that's by a radiologist who was trained in med school to read X-Rays, not CT. And your oncology head CT may be read by a radiologist who specializes in abdominal pediatric Ultrasound. And there's almost certainly no double-reading for Quality Assurance. And there's no rating on radiologists to tell you who has the most accurate diagnosis. And he's probably using 2D measuring tools on 3D data - because that's what they're familiar with, and that's what the reconstruction software manufacturers provide, and that's the medical gold standard. On a shared computer, where some other radiologist (or resident!) might have changed the display settings in a way he didn't notice. And he's probably been reading images for 14 hours straight.
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It really is no wonder that the softer sciences have a reproducibility problem. Even Further, I think it's also indicative of medicine being full of people that have a fatalistic, passive attitude towards their patients and medical care. Medicine and health is really hard, and so many health professionals essentially believe that the only thing they can do is wait until something horrible happens before doing anyth…
It's somewhat less depressing than that, from a personal point of view, at least. Most interventions carry with them pretty significant risk. Therefore the choice is not between "do nothing and see what happens, or do something with zero risk and see if it helps", but rather "do nothing and see what happens, or do something really high risk and see if it does more harm than good." Iatrogenic disease (harm caused by i…
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#44I coauthored a paper a few years ago on the intra-observer variability of measurements of brain tumors when using the bidimensional product. An increase of 25% in the BP is taken as an indicator of brain tumor progression. We found that the intra-observer variability is so high, you can get that 25% increase purely by chance. The first recommendation of the medical team, to wait and see, is understandable.
I'm kind of fascinated that this sort of thing is still considered a publishable result. It's been known for at least twenty years that intra-observer variability is a significant factor in such things. I'm not knocking the work you've done, but pointing out that when I was working in radiotherapy in the early 90's this kind of stuff (not on bidimensional product specifically, but whatever tumor volume measures were…
This area is really neat to me because it seems at first to be easy: just take a couple of pictures, compare them, and there's the answer, right? But then you start thinking about differences in imaging modalities, contrast agents, calibration, signal processing, measurement axis, etc. and the problem becomes so hard I want to find something easier to work on.
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#45Wow. Amazing story. Moral of the story : If you can, ask for a second opinion!
[1] situation is very complex, probably need to remove part of an organ [2] the he could fix the issue without ablation
le: simplification
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#46I coauthored a paper a few years ago on the intra-observer variability of measurements of brain tumors when using the bidimensional product. An increase of 25% in the BP is taken as an indicator of brain tumor progression. We found that the intra-observer variability is so high, you can get that 25% increase purely by chance. The first recommendation of the medical team, to wait and see, is understandable.
That is a shocking thing to say. If they had followed the wait and see approach there's a good chance she might be blind right now. This high-handedness is why I have such a hard time with the medical profession.
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That doctors are (rightfully) unable to pay proper attention to everyone and everything just due to the sheer number of patients they must see. Why are we excusing this? This is an allocation and resource problem. Frankly, I never understood why I need to schedule an appointment with a doctor and also visit a pharmacy to get drugs like anti-acids, allergy medicine, short doses of painkillers, antibiotics, short dose…
Devil's advocate: one man's cure is another's demise. The vast majority of people know how to regulate their consumption of those not-so-bad things, but regulating their consumption of healing technology without understanding the potential downsides is what the powers at be are concerned about. But I generally agree with you, it is an allocation problem, and the best way to allocate resources is removing arbitrary ba…
Zantac can now be gotten OTC for next to nothing. Its completely safe. There was no patient risk for this drug. Same when I had to ask a doctor for Claritin. It also is safe as an OTC drug now. Meanwhile, we have research that shows that even a slight overdose of acetaminophen can seriously damage your liver.
The whole system is about maximizing profits for healthcare. It has very little to do with outcomes or patient safety. This is why so many people aren't getting the care they need. The industry is too busy creating "make work" for profits.
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#48Alternate title: Man encourages his wife to go through unnecessary surgery for a benign and symptomless meningioma after she had an unnecessarily complicated thyroid removal in order to avoid a 4cm scar on her neck. Oh, he also made a shitty 3D model of her skull in the process.
There was a recent article saying the biggest factor for successful surgery is the quantity the surgeon has performed. In this case he had done thousands, and did plastic surgery too (hence a minimal scar).
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a shocking thing to say. If they had followed the wait and see approach there's a good chance she might be blind right now. This high-handedness is why I have such a hard time with the medical profession.
> If they had followed the wait and see approach there's a good chance she might be blind right now. Operating on a brain unnecessarily has its own risks.
Re: Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
#50The DICOM format is widespread and you can find plenty of tools with a quick search.