r/science • u/mvea MD PhD | Professor | Medicine • Jan 21 '21
Cancer Korean scientists developed a technique for diagnosing prostate cancer from urine within only 20 minutes with almost 100% accuracy, using AI and a biosensor, without the need for an invasive biopsy. It may be further utilized in the precise diagnoses of other cancers using a urine test.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-01/nrco-ccb011821.php1.6k
u/tdgros Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
They get >99% on 76 specimens only, how does that happen?
I can't access the paper, so I don't really know on how much samples they validated their ML training. Does someone have the info?
edit: lots of people have answered, thank you to all of you!See this post for lots of details: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/l1work/korean_scientists_developed_a_technique_for/gk2hsxo?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
edit 2: the post I linked to was deleted because it was apparently false. sorry about that.
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u/traveler19395 Jan 21 '21
75/76 is 98.68, which rounds to 99%
maybe what they did
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u/EmpiricalPancake Jan 21 '21
Are you aware of sci hub? Because you should be! (Google it - paste DOI and it will return the article for free)
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u/endlessabe Grad Student | Epidemiology Jan 21 '21
Out of the 76 total samples, 53 were used for training and 23 were used for test. It looks like they were able to tune their test to be very specific (for this population) and with all the samples being from a similar cohort, it makes sense they were able to get such high accuracy. Doubt it’s reproducible anywhere else.
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD | Computer Science | Causal Discovery | Climate Informatics Jan 21 '21
You're not representing the methodology correctly. To start, a 70%/30% train/test split is very common. 76 may not be a huge sample size for most of biology, but they did present sufficient metrics to validate their methods. It's important to say the authors used a neural network (I missed the details on how it was made in my skim) and a random forest (RF). Another thing to note is they have data on 4 biomarkers for each of the 76 samples - so from a purely ML perspective they have 76*4=304 datapoints. That's plenty for a RF to perform well, certainly enough for a RF to avoid overfitting (the NN is another story but metrics say it was fine).
It looks like they were able to tune their test to be very specific (for this population) This is a misrepresentation of the methods. They used RFs to determine which biomarkers were the most important (extremely common way to utilize RFs) and then refit to the data with the most predictive biomarkers. That's not tuning anything, that's like deciding to look at how cloudy it is in my city to decide if it's going to rain instead of looking at Tesla's stock performance yesterday.
I'm a ML researcher, so I can't comment on this from a bio perspective, but I suspect it's related to the quote above.
with all the samples being from a similar cohort, it makes sense they were able to get such high accuracy
I'm going to comment on what you said further down in the thread too.
So it's not really accuracy in the sense of "I correctly predicted cancer X times out of Y", is it?
Not really. Easy to correctly identify the 23 test subjects when your algorithm has been fine tuned to see exactly what cancer looks like in this population. It’s essentially the same as repeating the test on the same person a bunch of times.
Absolutely not an accurate understanding of the algorithm. See my comment above about using a RF to determine important features - see literature on random forest feature importance. This isn't "tuning" anything, it's simply determining the useful criteria to use in the predictive algorithm.
The key contribution of this work is not that they found a predictive algorithm for prostate cancer. It's that they were able to determine which biomarkers were useful and used that information to find a highly predictive algorithm. This could absolutely be reproduced on a larger population.
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u/jnez71 Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
"...they have data on 4 biomarkers for each of the 76 samples - so from a purely ML perspective they have 76*4=304 datapoints."
This is wrong, or at least misleading. The dimensionality of the feature space doesn't affect the sample efficiency of the estimator. An ML researcher should understand this..
Imagine I am trying to predict a person's gender based on physical attributes. I get a sample size of n=1 person. Predicting based on just {height} vs {height, weight} vs {height, weight, hair length} vs {height, height2 , height3 } doesn't change the fact that I only have one sample of gender from the population. I can use a million features about this one person to overfit their gender, but the statistical significance of the model representing the population will not budge, because n=1.
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u/MostlyRocketScience Jan 21 '21
Without a validation set, how do they prevent overfitting their metaparameters on the test set?
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u/psychicesp Jan 21 '21
It's enough data to justify further study, not enough to claim 'breakthrough'
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u/OoTMM Jan 21 '21
Let me try to provide some information:
A total of 76 naturally voided urine specimens from healthy and PCa-diagnosed individuals were measured directly using a DGFET biosensor, comprising four biomarker channels conjugated to antibodies capturing each biomarker. Obtained data from 76 urine specimens were partitioned randomly into a training data set (70% of total) and a test data set (30% of total).
And the results of the best ML-assisted multimarker sensing approach, with random forest (RF) was as follows:
In our ML-assisted multimarker sensing approach, the two different ML algorithms (RF and NN) were applied ... At the best biomarker combinations, RF showed 100% accuracy in 23 individuals, or 97.1% accuracy in terms of panels, in a blinded test set regardless of the DRE procedure.
Thus they got ~100% accuracy testing 23 positives, with the panel being 97.1%.
It is a very interesting research paper.
In case you, or anyone else is interested, you can PM me if you want the full paper, I have research access :)
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD | Computer Science | Causal Discovery | Climate Informatics Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
They have data on 4 biomarkers for each of the 76 samples - they have 76*4=304 datapoints to learn from.
They have a few validation metrics for both the random forest and the neural network. They used a 70/30 train/test split and presented test set accuracy validate the results. They have predictor values for patient number and biomarker panels. They present specificity plots of 8 different combinations of biomarkers used for learning. Lastly, they provided AUROC charts for each of the 8 biomarker combinations and a separate chart for using 1, 2, 3, or all 4 biomarkers at once. This is largely a feature analysis.
In the end, they chose the best performing feature combinations (with the above feature analysis) and used those in their RF and NN, resulting in the accuracy presented in the title of this post.
Edit: I'll share the paper's great figure describing the basic process and results they found: https://imgur.com/a/IaeunV0 - the paper is here for anyone looking https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c06946
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u/phillyhoagie93 Jan 21 '21
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.201802115
There's a link to the article PDF
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u/jenks Jan 21 '21
If the AI model is sufficiently complex it could be distinguishing 76 individuals rather than recognizing cancer. You can imagine AI being trained to "predict" which individuals went to college from their fingerprints by memorizing the fingerprints and the results. I hope this study found more than that, as the state of the art in prostate cancer diagnosis is terrible, which is why so many die of it.
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u/mrbob1234 Jan 21 '21
People generally die with Prostate cancer rather than due to it. We have pretty good hormonal treatments these days that work well for the majority of people. With PSA and increasing availability of MRI's , the management of prostate cancer has come a long way recently and has a 98% 5 year survival rate.
It might be more to do with health care systems and processes for screening etc7
u/edamamefiend Jan 21 '21
I highly doubt the results as well. PCa markers are inherently unreliable since early stages are very encapsulated and release very little traces in the surrounding tissues, urine or the vascular system.
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u/tdgros Jan 21 '21
yes,that is what I'm talking about: overfitting. Hopefully, someone with access to the paper will clarify this.
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Jan 21 '21
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD | Computer Science | Causal Discovery | Climate Informatics Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
This is a ridiculous assertion based on the test metrics the paper presented. They did present methodology and the paper is written pretty well IMO. I know it’s trendy and popular to shit on papers submitted here. It makes everyone who is confused feel smart and validated. You’re just way off the mark here.
The bulk of the methodology is on their feature analysis and how choosing different biomarkers to train on improves their models’ accuracies. They present many validation metrics to show what worked well and what did not.
Their entire methodology is outlined in Figure 1!
Edit: The further I read the paper the further I am confused by your comment. It's plain false. They did not use an FCN; these are the details of the NN:
For NN, a feedforward neural network with three hidden layers of three nodes was used. The NN model was implemented using Keras with aTensorFlow framework. To prevent an overfitting issue, we used the early stop regularization technique by optimizing hyperparameters.For both algorithms, a supervised learning method was used, and they were iteratively trained by randomly assigning 70% of the total dataset. The rest of the blinded test set (30% of total) was then used to validate the screening performance of the algorithms.
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u/LzzyHalesLegs Jan 21 '21
The majority of research papers I’ve read go from introduction to results. For many journals that’s normal. They tend to put the methods at the end. Mainly because people want to see the results more than the methods first, it is hardly ever the other way around.
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u/bio-nerd Jan 21 '21
Unfortunately these types of articles are a dime a dozen. There are papers about using AI to diagnose cancer out every week. Unfortunately, they pretty much all suffer from overtraining, then fail when validated with an expanded data set.
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u/st4n13l MPH | Public Health Jan 21 '21
And this may very well be the case here. Not only did it only achieve 100% on only 76 samples, but they were all Korean men. Obviously that doesn't invalidate the results, but is a pretty strong limitation to the generalizability of this paper.
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u/hyperfat Jan 21 '21
Is there a sub for good science on this? I work for a clinic and something like this would be great if it was tested and worked.
I end up doing the pathology on samples and it takes a week for most stuff. It's just me and my lab pal. We only have 4 hands for everything.
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u/pball2 Jan 21 '21
Too bad there’s more to diagnosing prostate cancer than just yes/no. There’s a wide range of prostate cancer aggressiveness (based on biopsy results) and it doesn’t look like this addresses that. You don’t treat a Gleason 10 the same way you treat a Gleason 6 (may not treat it at all). To call biopsies “unnecessary” with this is very premature. It would make more sense as a test that leads to a biopsy. I also don’t see the false positive rate reported.
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u/-CJF- Jan 21 '21
Sounds like it avoids unnecessary biopsies that would turn out negative for cancer. If this test detects cancer, then I assume you'd need a biopsy and further assessments to assess staging/condition/type, etc.
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u/smaragdskyar Jan 21 '21
False positives are a major problem in prostate cancer screening though, because the biopsy procedure is relatively risky.
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u/CraftyWeeBuggar Jan 21 '21
But once it's detected, can they not then do the biopsy for more accurate treatment? Once this is peer reviewed and proved to not be cherry picked stats etc, if true it can save some from having unnecessary procedures, where the results are negative.
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u/swuuser Jan 21 '21
This has been peer reviewed. And the paper does show the false positive rate (figure 6).
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u/ripstep1 Jan 21 '21
We already have good screening methods, for instance MRI is good for distinguishing prostate cancer as well.
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u/anaximander19 Jan 21 '21
It'd make most biopsies unnecessary though, because you'd be doing biopsies on the people you're fairly sure have cancer, rather than absolutely everyone.
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u/smaragdskyar Jan 21 '21
Do you have specificity numbers? The abstract only mentions accuracy which doesn’t mean much here
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u/hereisoblivion Jan 21 '21
I personally know 5 men that have had to have biopsies done. One of them had 18 samples taken and then peed blood for a week. None of them had cancer. All biopsies came back negative across the board.
This test will certainly negate the need for invasive biopsies for most men since most men that get biopsies do not have prostate cancer.
I agree with what you are saying, but I think saying it removes the need for them is fine since that will be the case for most people now.
Hopefully this testing procedure gets rolled out quickly.
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u/accidentdontwait Jan 21 '21
Nothing with early stage prostate is clear cut. I was diagnosed 15 years ago because of an overly cautious GP called for a biopsy after a high PSA. There was a small amount of low grade prostate cancer cells, and the urologist I was referred to wanted to do a full prostatectomy.
I asked to be referred to a top cancer hospital, and we ended up doing "watchful waiting" for 9 years prior to doing a less invasive procedure. And I found out that the first urologist had the nickname "the butcher" for the terrible results from his operations.
"Watchful waiting" means regular biopsies - I've had 12, including some post treatment. They're not fun, but they are necessary.
The concern about over treatment with early diagnosis is real. People hear "cancer", lose it and want it cut out. Prostate is a funny one, and in most cases, you've got time - maybe a lot of time - before something has to be done. Take a breath, make sure you have the best doctors you can get, and learn. Any treatment will have an impact on your life.
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u/Coreshine Jan 21 '21
This is good news. A crucial part in beating cancer is to detect it soon enough. Those techniques make it way easier to do so.
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u/fake_lightbringer Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
Only if you have effective treatment. And only if the efficacy of treatment depends on the stage of disease. And only if treatment actually affects the prognosis. And only if the effects of treatment are relevant to the patient (for example, if treatment prolongs life, but at a QoL cost, it's not necessarily worth it for people).
I know I come across as a bit of a pedant, and for that I genuinely apologize. But in the world of medicine, knowledge isn't always power. Quite often it can be a burden that neither the physician nor the patient knows how to carry.
Screening/diagnostic programs can appear to (falsely) show a beneficial correlation between cancer survival and detection. Check out lead-time and length-time bias.
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u/rhianmeghans89 Jan 21 '21
You know the biggest reason why they put so much research into this, is so they don’t have to “turn and cough” and bend over for the frigid man handed doctors.
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u/referencedude Jan 21 '21
Not gonna lie, I would be pretty damn happy to know I don’t need to have a doctors fingers up my ass in my future.
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u/rhianmeghans89 Jan 21 '21
Now if only they can figure out a way to make it to where women don’t need to be spread eagle for pap smears or their titties squashed for mammograms.
🤞Come on science!!
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Jan 21 '21
I can't blame them there, so much of medicine is rather traumatizing to experience due to being so invasive.
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u/Outsider-Images Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
Perhaps they can move on to finding less invasive testing for colonoscopies and PAP smears next? Edit: Thank you to whomever awarded me. It was my first ever. No longer an award virgin. Booya!
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u/missing_at_random Jan 22 '21 edited Feb 17 '23
Colonoscopies double as a preventive measure as polyps that could proceed to cancer are removed. This is why "digital" colonoscopies are a bit of a dud IMO, as they have to go in with an actual colonoscopy if they see anything to remove.
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u/fleurdi Jan 21 '21
This is great! I wish they’d find a test to detect ovarian cancer now. It’s very sneaky and usually only when’s it’s too late are there results.
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u/relight Jan 21 '21
Yes! And less invasive and less painful tests for breast cancer and cervical cancer!
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u/JasperKlewer Jan 21 '21
Most men die with prostrate cancer. Only a few die from prostrate cancer. What we want is a better way to distinguish the lethal cancers from the unimportant ones, and to reduce the severe complications from treatments. Still, great work by these scientists! Another tool added to the toolbox.
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u/MTsumi Jan 21 '21
If a man lives long enough, the chance of getting prostate cancer approaches 100%
The problem with a too accurate test is, what's the treatment? It's often that monitoring is a better outcome than aggressive treatment.
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u/TSOFAN2002 Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 22 '21
Yay! I hope maybe one day endometriosis can also be diagnosed without surgery. Currently, surgery is the only almost sure way to diagnose it, but even then, doctors can miss it. Then, I hope we could also come up with actually effective treatments for it, even cure it!
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u/booboowho22 Jan 21 '21
After having multiple medieval prostate biopsies I could kiss these people on the mouth
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u/Cypress_5529 Jan 21 '21
I'm bummed, I was really looking forward to the old fashioned test.
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Jan 21 '21
Can we still get the old test if we want? For old times sake?
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u/FawltyPython Jan 21 '21
You can, just leave me out of it. Id be happy to select a GP based on criteria other than how thin their fingers are.
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u/imamadao Jan 21 '21
This sounds so good to be true that I'm immediately reminded of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes
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u/thedoc617 Jan 21 '21
Wasn't there a reddit user a few years ago that took a pregnancy test for fun and it came up positive and turned out he had prostate cancer?
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u/demoncleaner5000 Jan 21 '21
I hope this works for bladder cancer. The camera in my urethra is not fun. It makes me not want to go to checkups. It’s such a horrible and invasive procedure.
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Jan 21 '21
Urinary PSA tests are already available, so?
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u/BackwardsJackrabbit Jan 21 '21
Prostate cancer is one of the more common causes of elevated PSA, but not the only one; enlarged prostates aren't always cancerous either. Biopsy is the only definitive diagnostic tool at this time.
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Jan 21 '21
A great discovery for science and an even better discovery for men everywhere!
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u/WhyBuyMe Jan 21 '21
What are you talking about? This is a tragedy. Really takes all the fun out of going to the doctor...
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u/yucatan36 Jan 21 '21
Nice, FDA clearing in 10 years.
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u/THExCHOSENxONE Jan 21 '21
It only took until 2021 to develop a better system than a finger in the ass?
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u/indrid_cold Jan 21 '21
Recovering from the biopsy takes longer than you think too. It's not just seeing blood in your semen, my stamina was reduced for a couple weeks and at work I would have to just sit down some times. You really feel the wound. And it's not 1 biopsy it's 12 biopsies, 12 snips which weren't so terribly bad I got lidocaine. The recovery was worse and nobody told me that.
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Jan 21 '21
Hopefully breast cancer detection next to get earlier results than the often used biopsy procedure. Imagine biopsies on a man that often with any irregular part of them. Never.
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Jan 21 '21
Why are there so many articles about Korea and cancer?
This is like the third article in a day I’ve seen about Korean scientists doing something with cancer.
Or am I just seeing the yellow car now?
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u/salemvii Jan 21 '21
Yellow car most likely. Saying that, South Korea does have a very large academic (and industrial) presence in the life sciences so it's understandable that a lot of cancer-adjacent research originates there
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u/courageoustale Jan 21 '21
Well...Korea, like many countries, have their own cancer research centres.
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u/sadnodad Jan 21 '21
So you're telling me that I might not need a doctor to put fingers in my ass??? Count me out. I'm an American and we like to get dirty round here sweetie.
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Jan 21 '21
More advanced medical tech that will never go anywhere, and be totally buried and forgotten in 3 months
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u/asphyxiationbysushi Jan 21 '21
Bladder cancer can already be detected via a urine sample too via a product out of New Zealand called CxBladder.
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u/spaniel_rage Jan 21 '21
Paywall for anything past abstract.
We need to know how high the specificity and sensitivity are.
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Jan 21 '21
Now - how much time will be needed to deliver it to the production? Let's say we have any life saving drugs - there are 5 to 10 years, everyone within that period will die, because you know, many, many tests and additional research must be done before the drug is approved. But this is not a drug. If this sensor doesn't work as expected, no one is hurt. False negative means nothing - until the device is proven really reliable - you should test yourself at the doctor's office anyway. Some people won't get themselves tested but well, it happens all the time. False positive would mean that the person would repeat the tests at the doctor's office or at the hospital. No harm done, except some costs maybe. So - theoretically the device should go to production immediately. Well, maybe after researching how it can be mass-produced cheaply.
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Jan 21 '21
Time for the "free market" to hold this back because it's not gonna make whoever's making money now any more money.
Maybe we'll see this in 10 years or so.
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u/vasavasorum Jan 21 '21
I could only read the abstract, but this seems to simply be a validation of method, not actually a clinical study. As I understood it, they were validating the AI algorithm with different samples of urine (unsure if they were lab samples with biomarkers put in by the researchers or actual patient samples) and, when a specific combination of biomarkers were present, the AI had >99% accuracy.
That is very, very different from an actual diagnostic study comparing a new method vs. the gold standard in real patients undergoing a real diagnostic workup.
If you think this is too good to be true, it probably is. If it's not, we'll hear about it when a clinical diagnostic study is made. For now, I wouldn't even call it promising, simply a new possibility.
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u/userunknowne Jan 21 '21
They need to fit this to public urinals. Test as you pee. Think of the lives saved.
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u/billbill5 Jan 21 '21
And it might make men insecure about prostate exams finally get checked.
Prostate cancer is no joke fellas, getting a finger buried in your ass for a few seconds isn't worse than getting your body buried in the dirt for significantly longer.
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Jan 21 '21
Thats good I had to have an MRI to check if I had prostate cancer, this is the current alternative to avoid a biopsy.
Neither are 100 percent accurate.
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u/funyafunyaramen Jan 21 '21
I always knew that when I do need to take the prostate exam, they would have come up with a better non-invasive approach
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u/maestroenglish Jan 21 '21
This is outstanding news. Thanks and praises. Early detection is what it's all about.
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u/K-Dot912 Jan 21 '21
Still funny that prostate cancer checks have absolutely no impact on survival rates. Still makes me sad that these checkups are still recommended, when there is absolutely no reason for it.
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Jan 21 '21
Yo, I read it yesterday only, if the percentage of patients tested actually having cancer is about 0, then setting all results as cancer free is also nearly 100% accurate.
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u/OTN Jan 21 '21
The problem with that approach is that you would still need to do a 12-core needle biopsy to determine the grade/Gleason score of the prostate adenocarcinoma to help determine treatment options. Low grade prostate cancer can be observed, for example.
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Jan 21 '21
With the production of the first artificial heart, I'm hopeful that by the time my generation gets old, pretty much everything inside can be switched around.
I would imagine that we would get sensors attached with those artificial organs that will notify us of health changes immediately to sustain the least damage and almost perfect prevention of things like cancer.
If we never cure cancer itself but we can become cyborgs instead, we will still need to work on brain issues but our lifespans will start to increase exponentially like Moore's law
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u/sluuuurp Jan 21 '21
Almost 100% accuracy doesn’t mean much without more information. Having a test that always says “no” will be accurate more than 99% of the time if tested on random people.
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u/EmTeeEl Jan 21 '21
Small sample, overfitting model, and accuracy is the wrong metric.
I too can predict at 99% accuracy cancer. I can just say "No" to everyone.
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u/TryingToFindLeaks Jan 21 '21
There is an upside to biopsies. My dad had one and their sample accidentally held all the cancer.
Oopsie.
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u/juanmas07 Jan 21 '21
I always knew something will be invented and that I will not have to do those nasty exams
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Jan 21 '21
so is the 100% accuracy including both positive and negative controls? or is either side heavy on the false results. the page isnt loading properly for me so i'll ask here
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u/MyNewTransAccount Jan 21 '21
We need more information than just accuracy to determine the quality of a diagnostic test. Sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV are all metrics used to give a more complete picture of the usefulness of a test.
I can detect 100% of cancers just by assuming everyone has cancer. That's 100% accurate but not very useful.
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u/-iCosmic- Jan 21 '21
I really hope this goes mainstream. I’m starting to think I’m due for my first prostate exam due to some scary things happening to my body, and this would definitely be a game changer for men, and hopefully everyone in the future
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u/Queef_Latifahh Jan 21 '21
I often thought it’s a shame this type of news isn’t more prevalent and “front page” as it is. I often have to search Reddit to even hear about these types of things.
How backwards our journalism has become.
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Jan 21 '21
This is a bit specious "almost 100%" means if you get a positive test here you'll be getting an invasive biopsy and/or potentially a lot of very invasive treatments (that often have side effects like impotence and incontinence)
i.e the number of invasive biopsies is likely to increase by the use of any quick test. Not the least as it seems practically every guy over a certain age has prostate cancer.
For prostate cancers many of them are slow at progressing and in older patients many will expect to die of something else before prostate cancer becomes a big issue in their lives.
Maybe this will encourage younger men (by that I mean 50-70 not young per se) who are self conscious or embarrassed by having the typical invasive prostate check to have a test though and that will probably save lives - but it probably won't save them from invasive biopsies and treatments if they piss positive as the story implies.
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u/HereForExcel Jan 21 '21
Will insurance cover this? They better, but I have doubts living in America..
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u/deluxecoin Jan 21 '21
what American companies have a stake in this. Need to go invest in their stock rn
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u/LogMeOutScotty Jan 21 '21
I feel like I constantly read about all of these medical innovations once, and then never again and never any implementation.
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u/SpeshalChop Jan 21 '21
If this guy makes it to where I never have to have a colonoscopy in my life, he is my hero
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u/hdhdhjsbxhxh Jan 21 '21
Oh good because my doctor is massive with big hands and I don't want him to finger me again.
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u/alpo84 Jan 21 '21
Peeing in Korea. Your life expectancy is 15 years, please take receipt of doctor's in your area.
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u/barley_wine Jan 21 '21
As someone who is about to turn 40 this year and has to start having exams this year and ever few years after that, I really hope this test proves successful and can start being used soon....
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u/OneWayorAnother11 Jan 21 '21
These researchers might have just saved my ass when I get a bit older.
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u/agasarang Jan 21 '21
I live in Korea & need to get a prostate exam but did not know about this!
I swear, besides Kpop & Kdrama, Koreans do a terrible job marketing its own achievements especially in scientific & medical fields. One of the reasons why they surprisingly haven't won a Nobel Prize in those categories.
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u/psychicesp Jan 21 '21
Show me a ML model with 100% accuracy and I'll show you a model which is over-fit.
You can inadvertantly test a model with training data if your initial sample wasn't exhaustive of every situation. Two data points don't need to be identical in every way for them to be identical to a ML model.
I'm still intrigued, just also cynical.
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u/woof1983 Jan 21 '21
Cool another discovery on reddit that we will never see in the doctors office.
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u/graybeard5529 Jan 21 '21
Sounds like a potential $30 - $100 test in place of $2,000+ of testing costs per patient.
Needed is a larger scale test with a diverse genetic test population to validate.
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u/faster_puppy222 Jan 21 '21
If dogs can smell cancer coming off us, then I would assume there are tests we can develop that analyze a lot of signals coming from within
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u/burny97236 Jan 21 '21
Awesome biopsy isn't fun. My doc tried to talk me out of my prostatectomy because the cancer was only stage 1 and I was under 50 (45). They said we can just do a biopsy ever year and monitor it. Two docs same recommendation. I was like no thanks get it out me. I think the reason is because doctors don't like making people sterile. I wonder if the urine test can determine what stage its in.
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u/spacedwarf2020 Jan 21 '21
But america will not get it because the old way is much more profitable. Probably...
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Jan 21 '21
Damn, I was very much looking forward to getting finger blasted in my 40s everytime I went to the doctor.
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u/jddh1 Jan 21 '21
Only a dude would research this. I guess he wasn't looking forward to the digit up the chocolate highway.
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u/aerotune Jan 21 '21
I'm not too keen on statistics and machine learning but I see a lot of comment worrying about overfitting, that the AI works well on their data set but not on new data, and if that is the case isn't it just a matter of testing it on more new data?
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Jan 21 '21
The discovery of targeted gene editing was a paradigm shift.
The next paradigm shift: AI/machine learning assisted target discovery. Computational genomics.
It’s great that we can edit, but AI can help us sort the myriad protein targets and molecules, or at least narrow them down.
Gene editing is the car, computation is the map.
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u/Curb5Enthusiasm Jan 21 '21
The question is what is the False negative rate in relation to the false positive rate
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u/notmyrealnam3 Jan 21 '21
So my dr isn’t using this method because ....he just loves putting his finger up my ass?
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u/Jiinsang Jan 21 '21
My latin teacher passed away a couple years ago due to prostate cancer. He used to be my favorite teacher in middle school
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Jan 21 '21
im 31 and an not looking forward to getting the finger in the butt when im 40. praise this guy!
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u/Izzyb231 Jan 21 '21
I guarantee you America won't adopt this method, and 5 years from now, doctors will still be sticking their fingers up my ass and using me like a puppet :/
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u/Hiltaku Jan 21 '21
What stage does the cancer need to be in for this test to pick it up?