Tech Article 12/4

Many job opportunities for pigeons have been very few and also far between since the electronic communication made their skills as many messengers obsolete. Although now it seems they could be put to work analyzing medical images. So says the team who trained pigeons to distinguish between healthy and cancerous breast tissue. Richard Levenson, from the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues showed pigeons microscope images of breast tissue. Then they rewarded them when they correctly pecked a colored button that corresponded to either cancerous or healthy tissue. After 15 daily sessions, each lasting an hour, the pigeons got the right answer 85% of the time. While doctors won’t be turning to pigeons for a cancer diagnosis any time soon, the birds could play a useful role in the development of image analysis technology. Researchers develop software that manipulates medical images so doctors can interpret them more easily, but it takes several hours to work out if the software helps or hinders a diagnosis.