Disclaimer
To be clear, there is NO SINGLE WAY to describe all cancer from any given stand point, otherwise radiology should be solved by now 1
It can take many form, and here are just a few examples: So, claiming I can give your a wordy way to teach you HOW to spot cancer from medical images would be a HUGE OVERSTATEMENT Instead, my goal here is to help you understand WHY cancer look that way, and this builds intuition of HOW to build a system that spot cancer
What is cancer
Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body 1 the simple description from wikipedia actually contain 3 key characteristics
- grow bigger (rapidly)
- invade surrounding organ
- move (replicate) elsewhere
and your body are “corrupted” in few ways
- it becomes hard due to rapid growth and fighting with surrounding (Desmoplasia)
- promoting blood vessel for nutrients supply
- surrounding lynph nodes are infected
The tell tale signs
the above characteristics shall be reflected in medical imaging, though may have different appearence across different modality x body region x patient
- have in conspicuous “object”; especially true if you have followup scans (longitudinal imaging studies) and really measure the growth
- the boundary becomes obscured , spiculated
- more than single occurance
- this is somewhat subtle and varies alot from different modality, but the general theme here is “inhomogenity” and patterned calcifications
- irregular vessel pattern / blood flow (in Ultrasound you can visually see the blood flow into the foreign blob)
- looking for surrounding lynph nodes that are accumulated, enlarged, distorted in shape and texture
build a algorithm
- you then start building a intrumental “cancer” detector looking for
References
- TODO: Hinton’s prediction link ↩