Comment by gjulianm
6 days ago
> That's actually exactly why it's important to have MRIs more frequently to be able to establish baselines and identify trends as they develop.
How? How do you establish baselines? How do you build a classification of incidental findings? It's very possible that you'll find a lot of types and not a lot of representatives of each type. And then you have to correlate that to actual clinical results, but the population will be so heterogeneous that it'll be really hard to find an actual result.
It's not just "let's throw more data at the problem".
When I say establish baselines what I mean is to establish baselines for the individual.
If you have records of the locations and sizes of various atypical structures and forms throughout the body going back for years and all of a sudden one of them starts changing in size at a rate disproportionate to its history, that's probably cause to dig a little deeper.
It's certainly not "throw more data at the problem". Instead it's about giving the data a time axis with some decent fidelity.
> and all of a sudden one of them starts changing in size at a rate disproportionate to its history, that's probably cause to dig a little deeper.
That sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
- What's "disproportionate to its history"? Obviously something going from 1mm to 10cm is worth checking out, but what about something going from 1mm to 2mm? Might be a tumor, might be that the position is just slightly different.
- What about other less measurable factors? Example, border features. That's harder to measure and things like movement or different machines can change how the borders of a feature look. How do you know what's a baseline and what's not.
- How frequently do you run these scans? It's likely that if something "starts changing in size" suddenly it will start giving symptoms before you have your next scheduled scan.
> It's certainly not "throw more data at the problem". Instead it's about giving the data a time axis with some decent fidelity.
It's definitely throwing more data at the problem, and you're assuming that it's viable to give "a time axis with decent fidelity". MRIs are much more complicated to interpret than people think, and screening is a much harder problem too. There are a lot of studies testing MRI imaging as a screening technique (among other techniques) and they don't always show an increase in survival rates.