
Pigeons taught to diagnose breast cancer on X-rays - randomname2
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28506-pigeons-taught-to-diagnose-breast-cancer-on-x-rays/
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yareally
Back in the 60s, there was a study done with pigeons being able to inspect
pills on an assembly line[1]. Didn't end up being implemented in a real world
scenario, but pigeons are extremely good at recognizing patterns without
losing attentiveness over time. There's a pretty good book[2] on pigeon
intelligence for anyone wanting to know more about their abilities.

I've an amateur ornithologist (it's a hobby), but never been a huge rock
pigeon fan. However, I respect their abilities and how much we underestimate
them.

[1]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=HxU-9UeDCI0C&pg=PA497&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=HxU-9UeDCI0C&pg=PA497&lpg=PA497#v=onepage&q&f=false)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Pigeons-Fascinating-Worlds-Revered-
Rev...](http://www.amazon.com/Pigeons-Fascinating-Worlds-Revered-
Reviled/dp/0802143288)

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dutchbrit
Interesting links. People tend to underestimate pigeons (I use to race them
when I was younger).

Another interesting article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon)

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will_pseudonym
Neat! My uncle used to race them, and as a kid, I would take the bands off of
their ankles and into the clock-in box.

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benkuykendall
That's really cool! Here's a similar study that showed pigeons could "learn"
the solution to the Monty Hall problem
[http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/com/124/1/1](http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/com/124/1/1)
The whole point of this problem is that it is counter-intuitive for humans --
but I don't think birds naturally have intuition for this kind of problem, so
they solve it without bias, purely from observed probabilities.

I wonder if it's useful to think of pigeon learning like a machine learning
algorithm -- after being shown examples of images that are classified
according to some relatively simple but unknown boolean function, the pigeons
can predict the value of that function on new examples.

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mikevansnell
And we all thought PigeonRank was a joke:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7939208/Top-10-technol...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/7939208/Top-10-technology-
hoaxes.html?image=3)

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brudgers
Direct link to paper:
[http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info:d...](http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0141357&representation=PDF)

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cing
From the paper: "...when given a different task—namely, classification of
suspicious mammographic densities (masses)—the pigeons proved to be capable
only of image memorization and were unable to successfully generalize when
shown novel examples. " Sounds like overfitting, we need to L2 regularize
these pigeons.

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i336_
Presuming unconditionally for the sake of argument that this methodology
actually works, I'm curious - would it be possible to make this type of thing
self-sustaining?

As in, the pigeons are rewarded (or not) based on their choices within only a
few moments, given only the pigeons' input to the system.

If pigeons were isolated and input was fed to them in parallel, then two or
more inputs were taken to mean consensus and interpreted as evidential truth,
would the distribution between individual pigeon responses mean that false
positives would be evened out across the input distribution, or would such a
technique result in progressive drift of accuracy?

I'm guessing some form of drift would be quite likely, and that for a real-
world system a firehose of already-known outcomes (go vs. no-go) would need to
be fed to the pigeons to ensure accuracy. Taking it further, I wonder if the
drift could be modelled and accounted for...

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kafkaesq
I've often felt like one of those pigeons -- pecking away for hours on end the
sake of "differential food [rent, etc] reinforcement" \-- at many of my
programming jobs.

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finance-geek
I'm doing Caffe setups for learning on XRays...and I also feel like a pigeon
going thru all the scripts. Now that's meta!

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jbandela1
This article has a completely misleading title. In reading the article, it
looks like pigeons were able to identify breast cancer on pictures of
pathology slides (ie done using a microscope). The article states that they
were not able to identify tumors on mammograms (the study that actually uses
x-rays). So no pigeons were not taught to diagnose breast cancer on X-Rays.

