Out of curiosity- the blog leans heavily on examples of clinicians operating in the developing world. Would the same lines of serodiagnostic techniques tend to be realistic in lower-resourced settings like that?
It seems plausible to argue that if you can afford a CT and a radiation therapy machine, then you probably meet the resource bar for the new family of techniques, but I just don’t have much of a reference point to judge.
> It seems plausible to argue that if you can afford a CT and a radiation therapy machine, then you probably meet the resource bar for the new family of techniques
Pretty much. The thing, though, is that places like Ghana (were I worked, I am a bit less educated about other places) get second hand machines from the US, Israel, UK, and Russia, so it'll take a few years until serodiagnostic and serotherapy labs "trickle down." So here he's right, not everyone has those resources.
However, the _imaging_ and _localization_ of lesions was never the issue.
Neither is the radiotherapeutic treatment. If you don't have enough power to do both at the same time, you won't have enough power to do his approach, since neither AI nor human eye can see through tissues. Humans move. Humans breathe. Either you take those movements as given, and live with the wider consequences, or you spend millions of cyber knives (https://med.stanford.edu/neurosurgery/divisions/radiosurgery...) that detect movement and counteract it. Having a more colorful version of the initial imaging won't change that. A radiologist's eye can do the same, and unless I see compelling evidence that the AI can do it better, something I have not seen, yet, any of the now 30+ solutions for AI analysis (as I said, Bruker and others are also offering theirs for free and open, and behind them stand massive research apparatuses) should especially not be used in developing countries.
Seriously, finding tumors and staging them is the easiest part of this job. And the rest can't be done by AI (yet.)
Thanks for your comment. However I don't think finding lesions is trivia especially if you are dealing with a patient with multiple brain Metastasis of more than 10 or even 20, 30 in counts.
For SRS, accurate localization and contour, label are crucial for the better outcome.
It seems plausible to argue that if you can afford a CT and a radiation therapy machine, then you probably meet the resource bar for the new family of techniques, but I just don’t have much of a reference point to judge.