At 36.7M Frames Per Second, STEAM Camera Is A Powerful Cancer-Detecting Machine(techli.com)

24 pointsby casemorton14 lat temu6 comments

At 36.7M Frames Per Second, STEAM Camera Is A Powerful Cancer-Detecting Machine

http://techli.com/2012/07/steam-camera-cancer/

2 comments

“The biggest problem in detection of such cells is that these cells are extremely rare- one in a billion blood cells,” says Goda.

According to Goda, the cutting edge device now harbors an unprecedented false-positive rate of one cell in a million.

For anyone who has forgotten statistics like me and was thrown off by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors#Fals...

The false positive rate is the proportion of absent events that yield positive test outcomes, i.e., the conditional probability of a positive test result given an absent event.

bergerj14 lat temu

1 of 1B - [pre-cancerous cell] to [normal cell]

1 of 1M - [false-positive cell] to [cells tested]

So, given my poor stats background and guessing what that means...

1B - cells tested

1k - false-positive cells

1 - pre-cancerous cell

-->

20T - ALL cells tested

20M - false-postive cells

20k - pre-cancerous cells

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_blood_cell#Human_erythrocyt...

Ralith14 lat temu

So one in one thousand positive results is legitimate. How is this tool remotely useful?

DanBC14 lat temu

They don't mention their false negative rate, nor any of the rates for competing tech. So we can't say that this device catches the one in X that other machines don't catch. And we can't say that this machine finds 1 in 1,000, where competing machines only finds 1 in 100,000.

In theory early detection is good, but I'm not sure what treatment is available if cells are found this early ad the stress for the other 1,000 people is going to be significant.

Ralith14 lat temu

So one in a million healthy blood cells will register as cancer, while the expected frequency of true positives is around one in a billion. Maybe I'm still screwing up the statistics, but doesn't that mean that the results of testing cancerous and normal blood will be almost indistinguishable?

djmdjm14 lat temu

What are the advantages of this over regular flow cytometry? I guess it would allow instant imaging of morphological changes, but this would require staining anyway (right?) at which point one could use flow to separate out suspicious cells and image at one's leisure using more conventional techniques.