Half of women will get a false positive 3D mammogram, study finds

Re:Half of women will get a false positive 3D mammogram, stu... by CTmystery on Friday March 25, 2022 @01:28PM (#30804932)

I'm going to join you down at the bottom here. I agree with you it isn't quite right, and I _think_ the reason comes from a couple sleights of hand. One: healthy people don't go in testing for the presense of a rare disease. That is, if you are administering this test to 10,000 people and only one truly has the disease, then any statistic that you back out of this trial is well below any significance. Two: the colloquial use of 'accuracy' is not the statistical use of 'accuracy'. This post uses the former for our 'intuition' and the latter to demonstrate that our intuition is wrong.

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Re:Half of women will get a false positive 3D mammogram, stu... by danachow on Friday March 25, 2022 @02:49PM (#30805753)

There’s not much wrong with the original other than using the term “accuracy” when what is actually meant is “sensitivity”. But it is not colloquial.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

> healthy people don't go in testing for the presense of a rare disease.

Well that’s precisely the point. There’s frequently the idea raised among lay people that it would be beneficial to test or screen for all kinds of rare or even just uncommon diseases that have high mortality in the general populace. This is the counter argument.

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Re:Half of women will get a false positive 3D mammogram, stu... by giantg2 on Friday March 25, 2022 @03:06PM (#30805946)

And many tests, likely the more invasive ones used to confirm these initial tests, carry risks. Even something as "routine" as a colonoscopy carries risks.

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