It bothers me that their control screen looks like Windows XP.
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Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
31–40 of 101 posts
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not necessarily. Check out these numbers: Sensitivity is what fraction of the affected people are actually found. Here: 90%, so 10% are missed. Specificity is what fraction of the unaffected people are detected as such. Here: 95%, so 5% wrongly detected ("false positives"). In Europe, there are 60 cases of lung cancer per 100 000 people. That makes 54 correctly detected per 100 000, missing 6 cases. That also mea…
The article says 99% accuracy for 13 cancer types. Some cancers like pancreatic are a death sentence because it's usually caught too late. "Toshiba says its device tests for 13 cancer types with 99% accuracy from a single drop of blood" "The test will be used to detect gastric, esophageal, lung, liver, biliary tract, pancreatic, bowel, ovarian, prostate, bladder and breast cancers as well as sarcoma and glioma."
The numbers were taken from a parent posters post to illustrate that things are not necessarily what they seem with probabilities.
The particular types of cancer are leading the list of most casualties by cancer-type by the way. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-cancer-deaths-by-ty...
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not necessarily. Check out these numbers: Sensitivity is what fraction of the affected people are actually found. Here: 90%, so 10% are missed. Specificity is what fraction of the unaffected people are detected as such. Here: 95%, so 5% wrongly detected ("false positives"). In Europe, there are 60 cases of lung cancer per 100 000 people. That makes 54 correctly detected per 100 000, missing 6 cases. That also mea…
The article says 99% accuracy for 13 cancer types. Some cancers like pancreatic are a death sentence because it's usually caught too late. "Toshiba says its device tests for 13 cancer types with 99% accuracy from a single drop of blood" "The test will be used to detect gastric, esophageal, lung, liver, biliary tract, pancreatic, bowel, ovarian, prostate, bladder and breast cancers as well as sarcoma and glioma."
Yes but 5% of false positive raise the price of this a lot for a large scale campaign.
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's very cheap, fast and convenient, then it's enough for at least screen the population regularly. Catching only part of the cancers is quite nice already.
No, not necessarily. Check out these numbers: Sensitivity is what fraction of the affected people are actually found. Here: 90%, so 10% are missed. Specificity is what fraction of the unaffected people are detected as such. Here: 95%, so 5% wrongly detected ("false positives"). In Europe, there are 60 cases of lung cancer per 100 000 people. That makes 54 correctly detected per 100 000, missing 6 cases. That also mea…
Yup. And some of those follow on tests could be quite invasive and risky in their own right. With that kind of false positive rate, you'd be risking the life of a not insignificant number of people.
Either that or driving up healthcare costs significantly as those 5000 people are going to need an MRI or CAT scan or something else to rule out cancer.
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's very cheap, fast and convenient, then it's enough for at least screen the population regularly. Catching only part of the cancers is quite nice already.
I'd suggest reading these to get a better idea of the potential harms of screening tests in the asymptomatic population: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screeni... https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the_screening_test_t... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-against-early-...
This is true for any medical act you perform on a massive scale really. Including vaccination, supplementation, etc. Everything is a cost/benefit ratio.
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#36This kind of device should join perpetual motion machines on the very short list in patent law where a working model is required as part of the patent application.
In its favor is the fact that no Toshiba executive will be able to distract VCs and senior statesmen the way the top Theranos executive could.
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not necessarily. Check out these numbers: Sensitivity is what fraction of the affected people are actually found. Here: 90%, so 10% are missed. Specificity is what fraction of the unaffected people are detected as such. Here: 95%, so 5% wrongly detected ("false positives"). In Europe, there are 60 cases of lung cancer per 100 000 people. That makes 54 correctly detected per 100 000, missing 6 cases. That also mea…
Damn, I knew I sucked at probabilities, but I apparently I didn't know how much.
I think it's pretty intuitive once your attention is called to the issue. The specific numbers aren't even that important. The general principle is that a screening test for any condition that is rare compared to the error rate isn't going to be very useful due to the large number of false positives. And most severe conditions we want to know about are rare.
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ouch. Give me a needle please.
The finger prick is an interesting non-sexual way to positively identify masochists. Everything about the finger prick takes away control while maximizing pain. A nurse can't/won't give you an arm jab until you relax your arm but they'll detonate a finger jabber randomly with an audible 'snap' while you're helplessly watching it all happen in front of you.
Dude what
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd suggest reading these to get a better idea of the potential harms of screening tests in the asymptomatic population: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screeni... https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the_screening_test_t... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-against-early-...
This is true for any medical act you perform on a massive scale really. Including vaccination, supplementation, etc. Everything is a cost/benefit ratio.
Yes, and this math has been done on many of those interventions (certainly for vaccination) and the benefit holds up. That statistical base rates are problematic for cancer detection is a pretty well-understood problem.
Re: Toshiba device tests cancer types from a drop of blood
#40Not even in trials yet. GRAIL is running a 100K person trial, to read out next year. Also, not one paper showing this kind of prediction in the clinic, which GRAIL, freenome, Guardant etc all have.
No meaningful papers published + huge claims +single drop of blood = TheranosII