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by cromd 1556 days ago
Seeing some comments about the reliability of dogs, it’s good to keep in mind that traditional medical tests can also be quite unreliable. This link [1] explains how mammograms can have a “positive predictive value” (% alarms that are correct) of under 10% for many age groups. Maybe that’s what you want in a screening test to catch most of the bad stuff. And maybe dogs could be incorporated as one component of several.

Though, maybe similar to the sense of “unreliable” is that performance could vary a lot from dog to dog, or over time, in a way that might not be true for other tests. But Im not sure if that’s worth worrying about if the aggregate performance is quantified and comparable to other methods.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/40935...