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breast cancer, mammogram, subjectivity in diagnosis

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Asleep on the job?

23rd Nov 2005, 00:26 GMT

Filed under: Breast Cancer Almost 10,000 Irish women are having their breast cancer tests reviewed after a consulting radiologist was found to have done too few biopsies and ultrasounds than deemed necessary for the number of patients he tested. Some of the women have already been called back to the hospital for further tests. The radiologist worked at three hospitals in Northern Ireland over the last several years: Altnagelvin, Belfast, and Antrim. Records at all three are being examined. Although this may be a case of negligence in action, it sheds light on a bigger problem: breast cancer screening is highly subjective by nature, mammograms yield a lot of false negatives, and two radiologists will frequently interpret the same mammogram differently. In an effort to make them more accurate, many attempts have been made to develop computer-aided diagnostics (for instance, neural networks, software programs that are capable of learning how to recognize patterns from their "experiences" with data), but don't expect a computer to replace your radiologist tomorrow. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15797297&query_hl=15">This suggests that experienced radiologists are still better at spotting 'em than software. Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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