Comment by terminalshort
6 days ago
We do not have a lot of MRI data. The average person probably gets a couple MRIs in their lifetime, and this is biased because we wait until something is clearly wrong to get the MRI. If you want to find an MRI scan of an early stage asymptomatic cancer, the only data on that will be the exceedingly rare case that someone has something else unrelated wrong with them in the same general area and gets an MRI for that, and then just by chance also has the early stage cancer at the same time.
> we wait until something is clearly wrong to get the MRI. f you want to find an MRI scan of an early stage asymptomatic cancer, the only data on that will be the exceedingly rare case that someone has something else unrelated wrong
Not always. There are bunch of studies for MRI screening in high-risk populations for specific cancers. There are scoring systems for a lot of them based on imaging features and they do find asymptomatic cancers.
In fact, if you add low-risk populations to the studies used to design imaging scores, you might end up adding more noise and making the study more difficult and the scoring less accurate.