[Randypea]

My cancer was finally found in my intestine. This is another opportunity. My primary oncologist and local surgeon were telling me the primary tumor, which has metastasized to a very large liver tumor, could not be found. I did my own research and found they had ordered the wrong type of imaging scan. Only after I pushed to have the correct scan (Gallium 68 PET/CT scan) was the primary tumor found. This was a "lack of information" for my local oncologist. Computer-aided diagnosis would have helped him. An additional new symptom (flushing) appeared and my PCP recognized a specific cheap blood test was needed that led to the cancer being found. I am happy to contribute to an imaging study. But I want to work on cancer screening. What kind of automation/screening would be needed to prevent 10 years of misdiagnosis by my PCP? ... not only for this type of cancer but for all of the top 15-20 types of cancer. People are not being screened. How can we make screening affordable? And how can we raise awareness of possible misdiagnosis and or affordable screening?

[1e-9]

There currently is no good candidate for a imaging modality that can be used for a general screening program to find the top 15 to 20 cancers and I am unaware of anything on the near horizon. Such a scan would have to examine the neck thru the groin area to cover even just 10 out of the top 15 or so cancer types. Since screening involves patients with no symptoms, most patients won't actually have any disease and thus the imaging must be inexpensive, must have high sensitivity, must have a reasonable false positive rate, must involve little to no radiation, and must not require injection of contrast agents or radioactive tracers. That eliminates all of the imaging modalities I can think of that can examine large areas of the body for cancer. The best we have today are compromises on these criteria for patients that are at relatively high risk, such as a smoker or a cancer survivor, or for highly focused screening programs such as what we have for breast cancer.

[1e-9]

As we are getting a bit off-topic, I temporarily placed an email address in my profile, which you can use to contact me for further discussion.