It's so good that sometimes sick patients are sent home with a clean bill of health. <\/p>\n
And screenings don't always help: A 2013 study by Oxford University found \"no evidence\" that screening programs are responsible for the decline in breast cancer, and a study by the Huntsman Cancer Institute last year found that colon cancer is missed in about 6% of colonoscopies. <\/p>\n
A company is looking to change that margin of error by bringing a super-smart computer into the examination room. <\/p>\n
\"In one panel of scans that we looked at, when you look at the number of times that radiologists sent someone home with a clean bill of health, about 7% of the time that patient was ultimately found to have cancer,\" said John Zedlewski, a data scientist with Enlitic, a medical technology company. <\/p>\n
When Zedlewski used Enlitic's algorithm against the same panel, there weren't any mistakes. <\/p>\n
Related: These temporary tattoos measure glucose <\/p>\n
How does it work? Enlitic's technology uses machine learning -- which some say is a version of artificial intelligence. It takes medical information from one patient -- whether it's a CT scan, an X-ray or details about, say, a tumor -- and then converts it into a mathematical representation. It's then added to a large pool of data and compared to other patients who have experienced similar issues. <\/p>\n
Think of it as crowdsourcing your symptoms. And not just with one or two people, but millions. The more data the computer has, the smarter it gets, and the more accurate the diagnoses. <\/p>\n
At least that's the dream. But before this technology makes it to your local doctor's office, there are some barriers. <\/p>\n
Accessing all that data isn't easy. Not only do individual hospitals have their own data-keeping practices, but every department within that hospital does too. That means the vast amount of medical records are locked in servers, vaults and so-called \"data silos.\" <\/p>\n
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Could this computer save your life?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It's so good that sometimes sick patients are sent home with a clean bill of health. And screenings don't always help: A 2013 study by Oxford University found \"no evidence\" that screening programs are responsible for the decline in breast cancer, and a study by the Huntsman Cancer Institute last year found that colon cancer is missed in about 6% of colonoscopies Continue reading