Microsoft Corp. researchers want to
give patients and doctor a new tool in the quest to find cancers earlier: web
searchers. Lung cancer can be detected a year prior than it is using current
methods of diagnosis in more than one-third of cases by analyzing a patient’s
internet searches for symptoms and demographic data that put them at higher
risk, according to research from Microsoft published on 10 November in the
journal JAMA Oncology. The study shows it’s possible to use search data to give
patients or doctors enough reason to seek cancer screenings earlier, improving
the prospects for treatment for lung cancer, which is the leading cause of
cancer deaths worldwide. To train their algorithms, researchers scanned
anonymous queries in Bing. They took searchers who had asked something that
indicated a recent lung cancer diagnosis. Then they went back over the user’s
previous searches. They looked for searches such as those related to symptoms,
including bronchitis, chest pain and blood in sputum. The researchers reviewed
other risk factors such as gender, age, race and whether searchers lived in
areas with high levels of asbestos and radon, both of which increase the risk
of lung cancer.
No comments:
Post a Comment