It may sound a bird-brained idea but scientists believe pigeons could be used as cancer-screening pathologists.
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However, the pigeons fell short in evaluating the malignant potential of breast masses.
The pigeons performed virtually as well on images that they had never been shown before indicating that they had – in an extremely narrow sense – learned pathology.
Pigeons may be able to distinguish between benign and malignant breast histology and radiology, according to an animal behavioral study published November 18, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Richard Levenson from the University of California Davis Medical Center, Edward Wasserman from the University of Iowa, and colleagues. “Although pigeons are unlikely to be called upon to offer clinical diagnostic support it does seem quite possible that their discriminative abilities may be turned to a useful objective”.
“Accuracy from day one at low magnification rose from 50% correct to 85% days 13 to 15”.
The training environment for the pigeons, shown in the below video, included a food pellet dispenser, a touch-sensitive screen that projected the medical image, as well as blue and yellow choice buttons on either side of the image. Two of the four birds in that half of the experiments achieved 80 percent accuracy – but the successes appeared to be due to the birds memorizing images, the study found. A panel of human radiologists, by comparison, also scored an accuracy rate of 80 percent, they added. Their accuracy averaged 84 percent for images with microcalcifications that they had been trained upon, and 72 percent for novel images-a level of performance on par with human radiologists and radiology residents who were given the same cases to review.
Pigeons can be trained to tell the difference between cancerous and non-cancerous breast tissue by looking at it. Turns out that pigeons have incredible visual systems that are similar in many ways to our own, but considerably more powerful.
But the birds found it much more hard to classify suspicious masses on the scans – a task described as “very challenging” even for expert humans. The birds could do that job instead, they suggest.
A few doctors with a vast amount of training and years of education can misinterpret mammogram scans and have a hard time interpreting microscopic slides.
“While new technologies are constantly being created to enhance image acquisition, processing, and display, these potential advances need to be validated using trained observers to monitor quality and reliability”, said Prof Levenson.
“This is a hard, time-consuming, and expensive process that requires the recruitment of clinicians as subjects for these relatively mundane tasks”, said Professor Levenson. He says that pigeons’ sensitivity to features in medical images that are important for diagnoses make them ideal for providing feedback on several aspects aof their software development.
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The National Institutes of Health funded the work.
