A decent portion of my family are MDs. This is accurate.
However, this is also one of the places where it's quite disappointing to see human squishiness in action. When we opt to not receive data because we know there'll likely be non-malignant anomalies, we are also depriving ourselves of the raw data that allows us to discern non-malignant from malignant, data which would help very much in deciding on the cases we do receive.
A stream of known false positives is worth its weight in gold in any detection system, it's just that this specific system happens to contain squishy feely human doctors that are susceptible to short-term human 'Please don't spend more money than necessary, we're already in the red for this quarter' kind of pressures from their superiors.
Had we enforced a full-body MRI for every patient, we would quickly amass enough imaging data to know which anomalies are malignant and which are not to a very high degree, which would counteract the temporary cost increase in chasing false positives. The fact that we don't want to eat the short term initial cost means some of those things that could be uncovered by the scan, things that could save a person from a malignant deviation, is left unseen, untreated, to its natural end.
However, this is also one of the places where it's quite disappointing to see human squishiness in action. When we opt to not receive data because we know there'll likely be non-malignant anomalies, we are also depriving ourselves of the raw data that allows us to discern non-malignant from malignant, data which would help very much in deciding on the cases we do receive.
A stream of known false positives is worth its weight in gold in any detection system, it's just that this specific system happens to contain squishy feely human doctors that are susceptible to short-term human 'Please don't spend more money than necessary, we're already in the red for this quarter' kind of pressures from their superiors.
Had we enforced a full-body MRI for every patient, we would quickly amass enough imaging data to know which anomalies are malignant and which are not to a very high degree, which would counteract the temporary cost increase in chasing false positives. The fact that we don't want to eat the short term initial cost means some of those things that could be uncovered by the scan, things that could save a person from a malignant deviation, is left unseen, untreated, to its natural end.