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HughPickens.com writes:

John Markoff reports that researchers at Microsoft have demonstrated that in some cases they may be able to identify internet users who are suffering from pancreatic cancer by their search queries, even before they have received a diagnosis of the disease. The researchers looked at searches conducted on Bing that indicated someone had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, then worked backward, looking for earlier queries that could have shown that the Bing user was experiencing symptoms before the diagnosis. Those early searches, they believe, can be warning flags.

While five-year survival rates for pancreatic cancer are extremely low, early detection of the disease can prolong life in a very small percentage of cases. The study suggests that early screening can increase the five-year survival rate of pancreatic patients to 5 to 7 percent, from just 3 percent. (Steve Jobs died in 2011 after battling pancreatic cancer for years.) ""We find that signals about patterns of queries in search logs can predict the future appearance of queries that are highly suggestive of a diagnosis of pancreatic adenocarcinoma," the researchrs write. "We show specifically that we can identify 5 to 15 percent of cases while preserving extremely low false positive rates" of as low as 1 in 100,000."

Pancreatic cancer — the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States – was in many ways the ideal subject for the study because it typically produces a series of subtle symptoms, like itchy skin, weight loss, light-colored stools, patterns of back pain and a slight yellowing of the eyes and skin that often don't prompt a patient to seek medical attention. Although Microsoft has no plans to develop any products linked to the discovery, Eric Horvitz, who says he lost his best childhood friend and, soon after, a close colleague in computer science to pancreatic cancer, says the stakes are too high to delay getting the word out. "People are being diagnosed too late. We believe that these results frame a new approach to pre-screening or screening, but there's work to do to go from the feasibility study to real-world fielding."

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