6 ms·

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

24 points by casemorton 14y ago

picklefish 14y ago
“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#False_positive_rate 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.
- Ralith 14y ago
  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?
- bergerj 14y ago
  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_erythrocytes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_blood_cell#Human_erythrocyt...
  - Ralith 14y ago
    So one in one thousand positive results is legitimate. How is this tool remotely useful?
    - DanBC 14y ago
      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.
djmdjm 14y ago
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.

24 points by casemorton 14y ago

“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#False_positive_rate 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.

Ralith 14y ago
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?
bergerj 14y ago
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_erythrocytes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_blood_cell#Human_erythrocyt...
- Ralith 14y ago
  So one in one thousand positive results is legitimate. How is this tool remotely useful?
  - DanBC 14y ago
    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.

djmdjm 14y ago

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.