

At 36.7M Frames Per Second, STEAM Camera Is A Powerful Cancer-Detecting Machine - casemorton
http://techli.com/2012/07/steam-camera-cancer/

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picklefish
_“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#Fals...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors#False_positive_rate)

 _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._

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bergerj
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_erythrocyt...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_blood_cell#Human_erythrocytes)

~~~
Ralith
So one in one thousand positive results is legitimate. How is this tool
remotely useful?

~~~
DanBC
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.

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djmdjm
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.

