188
AI finds signs of pancreatic cancer before tumors develop
(www.nbcnews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
188 points (95.2% liked)
Technology
84377 readers
3506 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's particularly useful for pancreatic cancer, if it's accurate, reliable, cost effective, and practical in the real world.
seems they need scans from different patients, like alot of them to make it look accurate. i wonder how well it will do with 1 scan only, because a biopsy after 1 scan/ or another scam is unneccesary waste and expensive it detects one and finds nothing, biopsis are not pleasant. definitely on the cost and reliability, since it needs more than 1 scan, it likely would cost alot.
another point in the article, is the "abnormal cells hiding the actual cancer cells" likely could be abnormal fibroblasts, which are found in other cancer cells that feed the cancer itself(by giving up its neutrients"
Hey lookie here, the statistical pattern matching algorithm has some uses that could help society maybe possibly. Sure beats replacing artists or building inefficient chat bots that give people the Eliza effect.
It’s not, though and that’s the issue.
False positives are at least as dangerous as false negatives and AI solutions like this have massive problems with over diagnosing.
EDIT: It’s really fun to have a bunch of home-bound tech workers try to talk down to me about the science behind and practice of medicine.
Absolutely 100% wrong.
In pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a false positive means a follow-up scan. A false negative means death, the 5-year survival is near zero once it's caught late, but exceeds 80% when caught early.
In the study, the radiologists' lower false positive rate is achieved by missing 78% of cancers. That's not a safer trade-off, it's just a different way to fail. "Overdiagnosis" also requires a disease that might not have harmed the patient, PDA doesn't have a harmless form. Every missed case is a lost life while every false positive is an extra doctor's appointment.
This system detects twice as many cancers and was flagging them, on average, 675 days (nearly 2 years!) before clinical detection.
You selected a single pathology which supports your otherwise specious and false argument.
Be better.
If I'm wrong, then feel free to support your position with evidence or an argument showing that my statement was specious.
I linked the, peer-reviewed, paper which contains the data that supports my statements on the topic.
You've made two conclusory statements and immediately resorted to insulting comments when challenged.
There is not a single aggressive pancreatic cancer where a false negative is more dangerous than a false positive.
Percutaneous biopsy has a mortality rate of approximately 0.2% even relatively non-malignant pancreatic cancers (say Solid pseudopapillary neoplasm) have 10-year survival rates in adults of around 88% and that number is from cases which received surgical intervention and chemotherapy something that would not happen with a false negative.
So even in the worst case, the false negative multiple times more deadly. A false positives' most likely outcome is pancreatitis from the biopsy procedure.
They selected the pathology that’s the topic of the post to support their on-topic argument. Be better, indeed.
Really wish people could be better collaborators instead of just being jerks. Kills any value in the conversation.
Stop being a bad person, please.
You're rude, arrogant, and wildly incorrect from a medical standpoint. Please delete your message and don't make comments like this in the future.
No, I'm not. Sorry the ChatGPT response you got about medical science and outcomes from differing pathologies and the extremely serious dangers of pharmacological treatment from even a correct positive, to say nothing of the terrors visited on patients by false positives.
In other words: not useful at all. (Didn't read the article because it already misuses the AI acronym in the title, indicating it was written by some idiot with nothing to say)
Article actually describes it well enough, how scientists trained a model on data from CT scans of patients who were treated for other conditions some time before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
In my first sentence, I was referring to the combination of adjectives in the question by previous commentor. No one in today's health care systems is gonna pay preemptive screenings for saving peasant lives like yours or mine.
There are healthcare systems in the world other than the one in the usa
Yes, but all of them are worsening in the interests of profit, in case you weren't following the news. Germany is just scrapping skin cancer prevention, thanks to our corrupt fucks in government.
If course you do - if the cost of treating the patient down the line is going to cost you more. Public health systems have a vested interest in healthier citizens.
Problem is they are probably from the US which doesn't really have a public healthcare system.
Even in the US with private health insurance, those providers will pay for screenings that can save costs by catching something early. Sometimes that might be legally mandated, other times it’s based on cost/benefit. It all varies from plan to plan, but the more common a disease is the more likely they’ll pay for at least a low-cost initial screening.
The thing is providers of care like to make a profit though, and profit = money = influence on healthcare policies. Healthcare policies are not made solely with cost efficiency in mind, but rather to redistribute wealth from insurance payers to those who provide services. If that means a couple ten thousand of us peasants die a preventable death, then that's a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Where you live maybe. The NHS is centrally funded through taxation.
That does not contradict anything I said.
You used the AI acronym in the same way, so I'm confused by your arrogant sounding statement
Did I though? Are they using a model with any kind of abstraction layer that actually understands relationships between objects?
Yes and yes.
These are questions that you wouldn't have to ask if you didn't smugly decide that you didn't need to read before contributing your opinion.
If you can't be arsed to read the article, here's the peer reviewed paper in the British Medical Journal: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433
AI is different from LLM, you disingenuous fuck.
Did it get its knickers in a twist?
Hey weirdo why did you attack someone out of nowhere?
Fuck off if you can’t be an adult and hold your big AI feelings
Learn to troll, grandpa.
Learn to hold your big feelings, especially in public. This isn’t a troll, it’s life advice