At 36.7M Frames Per Second, STEAM Camera Is A Powerful Cancer-Detecting Machine

At 36.7M Frames Per Second, STEAM Camera Is A Powerful Cancer-Detecting Machine(techli.com)

24 points by casemorton 13 years ago | 6 comments

picklefish 13 years ago |

“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...

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.

bergerj 13 years ago | |

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...

Ralith 13 years ago | | |

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

Ralith 13 years ago | |

So one in a million healthy blood cells will register as cancer, while the expected frequency of true positives is around one in a billion. Maybe I'm still screwing up the statistics, but doesn't that mean that the results of testing cancerous and normal blood will be almost indistinguishable?

djmdjm 13 years ago |

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.