diagnosis
dr. dolittle | December 1, 2015You are probably thinking, whose bird-brained idea was that?
Well, as it turns out, a new study published in PLOS ONE shows that pigeons can be trained to accurately differentiate cancerous versus healthy tissue biopsies. This is because the process of diagnosing cancer involves visual screening of MRIs an biopsies and pigeons use similar visual processing as humans. Moreover, according to the article, pigeons are able to learn and memorize over 2000 images, a skill that likely helps in identifying cancerous cells.
In a quote from Scientific American, study author Dr. Richard Levenson (…
edyong | October 20, 2009This is the story of a Turkish boy, who became the first person to have a genetic disorder diagnosed by thoroughly sequencing his genome. He is known only through his medical case notes as GIT 264-1 but for the purposes of this tale, I'm going to call Baby T.
At a mere five months of age, Baby T was brought to hospital dehydrated and in poor health. In some ways, this wasn't surprising. His parents were blood relatives and they had suffered through two miscarriages and the death of one premature baby. Baby T himself was born prematurely at 30 weeks.
Baby T's family history suggested that he…
ddobbs | September 22, 2009
"One in six patients 'wrongly diagnosed by NHS doctors'," shouts the Daily Mail (via EvidenceMatters. This should not surprise us: Autopsies have been finding a similar percentage of misdiagnosis among the dead for decades. Doctors will always miss some diagnoses. Progress is a matter of ever narrowing the list of things doctors miss -- so the other problems can be diagnosed and treated, letting the patients live longer (till they did of something incurable -- or something we still haven't learned to diagnose. Learn to properly diagnose, say, appendicitis, and you can save the life of a10-…