

Autism Diagnosed with a Fifteen Minute Brain Scan  - kkleiner
http://singularityhub.com/2010/08/18/autism-diagnosed-with-a-fifteen-minute-brain-scan-video/

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Eliezer
So I'm reading and thinking, "this information is useless, I can't get a
likelihood ratio out of this"... and then someone actually provides the
Bayesian posterior probability! Woohoo! Rationality prevails! Could this be
the dawn of a new era?

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pjscott
The guy who calculated the likelihood ratio was writing in a blog post in
response to a bunch of mainstream articles which failed to do so. And then he
was quoted in SingularityHub, which I would hope would be a bit better-
informed than typical science journalists.

 _If_ this is the dawn of a new era, then the defining trait of this new era
is that people outside the mainstream can make themselves heard, thanks to the
internet. I'll happily change my mind about that if I see someone like the BBC
mention posterior probabilities in an article about this.

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MJR
How annoying that they continue to refer to Autism as a _disease_. Autism is a
developmental disorder.

~~~
AngryParsley
When talking about whether obesity or autism or whatnot is a disease, I think
this post sheds some light on the topic:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/)

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StavrosK
At a presentation of my university (UCL), one of the presenters told us that,
amazingly, she was able to detect clinical depression from an MRI scan with
very high accuracy. To be fair, she was not able to detect mild cases, but I
don't think the doctors can really distinguish between people being depressed
because of an external and a physiological cause...

That was the most surprising thing I've heard in quite a while...

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rtp
Ah, this one. Say you have a sample group with the size of 10000 people (all
randomly picked). The prevalence of autism is calculated to be around 1% of an
typical population. This would mean that the group consists of about 100
people who are autistic. The accuracy of this test is 90%, and thus this would
yield a positive result of about 90 people who really have autism, and about
1000 people who don't.

