Summary Of Paging Dr. Pigeon

I chose an article from The New York Times titled “Paging Dr. Pigeon; You’re Needed in Radiology” by Nicholas Bakalar that was published on November 24, 2015. The article discussed the recent study of training and using pigeons to identify benign or malignant breast tumors by looking at a slide from a biopsy or a mammogram at the University of California Davis medical Center, University of Iowa, and the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Emory University. This study was conducted as a tool and “surrogates for human subjects in medical image perception studies because they can be used in repetitive ways that few people could tolerate” (Bakalar, 2015). The study also stated that pigeons are extraordinary discriminators of complex …show more content…
The pigeon’s correct answer resulted in them receiving food, while an incorrect answer did not provide them with a treat. Each of the experiments showed the pigeons different images of breast tissue. For example, in Experiment 1, breast histopathology images were presented to the birds. Experiment 2 had images of microcalcifications in mammograms and Experiment 3 were pictures of mammogram masses. Overall, some of the birds were 80% accurate and others were 60% accurate. The study also found that the pigeons had remarkable ability to differentiate benign tumors from malignant tumors in breast histopathology that had a similar accuracy as that of a human. In conclusion, pigeons’ successes and difficulties in the experiment helped researchers better understand how to better medical imaging hardware, image processing, and different image analysis tools to better distinguish benign and malignant breast tumors to prevent progression of breast cancer. The title of the article “Paging Dr. Pigeon; You’re Needed in Radiology” caught my attention as I was scrolling through the list of article on the New York Times …show more content…
In certain instances the article distorts the concept and findings of research in order to bring readers or to prove a point. After reading and comparing the article and the study, the article nicely summarized the study. Bakalar reported the universities’ findings in a clear and concise way that still brought to light the incredible ability that pigeons have to determine if a tumor is malignant or benign. I think that Bakalar did a nice job simplifying the study and putting it into terms that anyone could understand. There were some terms and concepts used in the research that were difficult to understand in the study, but Bakalar made them reader-friendly in his