Radiologists spot cancer ‘in half a second’

EXPERIENCED RADIOLOGISTS can spot subtle signs of breast cancer in mammogram images in just half a second, a study involving researchers in Yorkshire has found.

Often they have no more than a “hunch” that something is wrong, but in reality their sharp eyes and brains pick up abnormalities at an astonishing speed.

In fact they seem to be able to recognise cancer in images that show no obvious signs of disease, research by York University psychologist Dr Karla Lane and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, USA, and Leeds University shows.

Dr Evans said: “Radiologists often have ‘hunches’ about images on first glimpse. Our work shows that those hunches are based on something real in the image.”

Dr Jeremy Wolfe, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said it suggested radiologists may be “picking up some sort of early, global signal of abnormality, that it unknown to us”.

He said: “It’s really striking that in the blink of an eye, an expert can pick up on something about that mammogram that indicates abnormality. Not only that, but they can detect something abnormal in the other breast, the breast that does not contain a lesion.”

In clinics, radiologists carefully evaluate mammograms with the help of computer-automated image screening systems. While in reality they would never make a diagnosis based on a half-second assessment, tests showed they were able to identify abnormalities at better than chance levels within this time.

Their accuracy did not depend on breast symmetry or density, but was improved by finer details of the texture of breast tissue.