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NEWS > HEALTH > COMPUTERS BETTER AT DETECTING BREAST CANCER, SAY COMPUTERS
COMPUTERS BETTER AT DETECTING BREAST CANCER, SAY COMPUTERS
November 12 2011
Stanford, CA – Eventually machines may do everything for us. They may make all our clothes, grow all our food, and pick up all of our garbage. Maybe. For now though, despite grave concerns by a lot of people that they are being pushed out of jobs by machines, the capabilities of those devices are still limited.
However, machines are coming on strong especially in the medical field. While many new advances still require the participation of highly-trained human beings, machines and computers are more and more becoming essential parts of the process of treating medical ailments. Now in one very specific field, a machine appears to have finally surpassed humans in efficacy; diagnosing breast cancer.
Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new computer system which has proven itself much more effective at diagnosing cancerous cells from tissue samples than traditional methods, something that will undoubtedly be of relief to millions of women around the world. However the result are still early and many are reticent to turn over such an important treatment to machines, fearing that the computers may just be telling them what they want to hear in order to get under their shirts.
“Through machine learning, we are coming to think of cancer more holistically, as a complex system rather than as a bunch of bad cells in a tumour,” said Matt van de Rijn, co –author of the study. “The computers are pointing us to what is significant, not the other way around.”
So far, the computer system is not able to actually feel lumps in breasts, the first line of defence in breast cancer diagnosis, but that may be coming.
While it’s not clear what the computer’s intentions might be, it’s believed likely that in the future such cancer diagnosis will be done exclusively by machine.
“If this works the way it seems to work it will mean nothing but good things for patients. This technique will not only be able to more accurately identify cancerous cells but also, hopefully, determine a course of treatment for those patients which will better prognosis,” said Scrape TV Medical analyst Dr. Phillip Waites. “Now that we are getting into this field, though, we are going to have to start looking at a developing a code of ethics for computer systems, something no one really thought of before. The last thing anyone wants is a new and potentially very beneficial computer systems to be undone by sex assault charges.”
Right now, the computer system does not have hands.
“There will be incidents. There will always be incidents in this area. Women are very sensitive about their breasts and in potentially having cancer so they are going to be touchy when it comes to this but so long as we have a system of checks and balances the system itself can survive, that is the most important part of the equation,” continued Waites. “With protocols in place we can better deal with the incidents that do come up, whether those incidents are a result of patients being hysterical or computers getting frisky.”
None of the Stanford machines have done anything untoward yet.
Lauren Hebert, Health Correspondent
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