Human eyes are not fail safe, but they are however uniquely attuned to picking certain things out, especially if they have been trained to look at certain things a certain way.

The breast mammography is no exception. Human eyes were determined to be just as good if not better in picking out mysterious or worrisome masses in breast mammography screenings, than a sophisticated computer. Talk about job security for humans!

There’s been a push to computerize and automate more and more machinery and testing in the field of medicine, simply because of staff shortage, and the idea that computers are more fail safe than humans, but this newest discovery that human eyes are as good if not better at reading mammography readouts is considered a setback for the computerization of the mammography test.

The results were found when researchers discovered that the computerized scans of the readouts often found harmless masses and detected them as potential breast cancer in a patient, while the human eye was more easily able to pick out and sort the harmless masses from the potentially cancerous masses that would need biopsied for further scrutinizing.

This means that the computerized mammographies that are used in thousands of cases of breast cancer screening may be unintentionally scaring women into thinking they have a worrisome breast mass, when in fact a human review may not have come to this conclusion.

It’s hard to say where they’re going to go with this information. Are they going to cut back on computerized mammographies and start increasing the use of human-reviewed mammograms, or not? Time will tell. Some things, people can just do better. Call it the human touch I guess!