Meet Your New Radiologist! ⋛⋋( ‘v’ )⋌⋚

Options

Okay, probably there won't be pigeons at your next breast imaging appointments but apparently they are pretty good at reading slides and this study from 2015 put themto the test.

This is interesting and entertaining but I'd much rather these resources be used to research cures and better treatments. Six years have passed and I don't think pigeons have been put to use in a lab yet.

Pigeons (Columba livia) as Trainable Observers of Pathology and Radiology Breast Cancer Images



“Overall, our results suggest that pigeons can be used as suitable surrogates for human observers in certain medical image perception studies, thus avoiding the need to recruit, pay, and retain clinicians as subjects for relatively mundane tasks. Beyond cost and convenience, there may be other advantages to using pigeons. For example, the level of observer expertise for any given study can be set by design, from naïve to expert—a distribution that may hard to achieve with readily available human viewers. In addition, pigeons can be used repeatedly in studies designed to explore a wide set of parameters [33] and more cases could be considered than human observers would ever tolerate, thereby yielding greater statistical power.“


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141357

Comments

Categories