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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Pigeons Can Detect Cancerous Tissue On X-Rays, Study Finds

• True Activist

Few consider pigeons to be an intelligent bird, but that may change now that scientists have trained an entire flock to pick out diseased breast tissue with an accuracy rate of up to 99%. 

According to a new study published in PLOS ONE, pigeons can distinguish between cancerous and healthy tissue in x-rays and microscope slides.

Three experiments, led by Richard Levenson, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of California Davis Medical Center, concluded that pigeons have a remarkable capacity to learn how to identify whether an image shows healthy or cancerous breast tissue.

According to the study, this is because the birds "share many usual system properties with humans." 

For the first experiment, eight pigeons were presented with 144 breast tissue images, all at various levels of magnification and with and without color. The birds could then peck a blue or a yellow button on either side of each image, their choice indicating whether it was cancerous or healthy.


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