Feeding leftovers to a white-naped jay in particular is thought by some healers to transfer the illness to unsuspecting avians. If that doesn’t

Using Pigeons to Diagnose Cancer

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2021-05-27 12:30:11

Feeding leftovers to a white-naped jay in particular is thought by some healers to transfer the illness to unsuspecting avians. If that doesn’t work, the roasted, powdered liver of the black vulture also apparently helps open restricted airways.

Birds and certain bird bits — their beaks, their feathers, their livers — are involved in traditional remedies throughout the world, practices that trace back to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt and early China. It turns out birds may play a helpful role in modern western medicine too. A new study suggests that the common pigeon can reliably distinguish between benign versus malignant tumors and, in doing so, could help researchers develop better cancer screening technologies.

Diagnosing cancer has a lot to do with vision. Pathologists study biopsy samples looking for cancerous cells. Radiologists scan x-rays and MRIs for possible malignancies. The authors of the new study were curious how these specialists acquire the skill to identify features and qualities of an image that signify cancer. To find out they turned to pigeons. Though primates and pigeons haven't shared a common ancestor for over 300 million years (it looked something like this) our visual processing biology is surprisingly similar to that of birds.

In the study, 16 pigeons were trained to detect cancer by putting them in a roomy chamber where magnified biopsies of possible breast cancers were displayed. Correctly identifying a growth as benign or malignant by pecking one of two answer buttons on a touchscreen earned them a tasty 45 milligram pigeon pellet. Once trained, the pigeons’ average diagnostic accuracy reached an impressive 85 percent. But when a “flock sourcing” approach was taken, in which the most common answer among all subjects was used, group accuracy climbed to a staggering 99 percent, or what would be expected from a pathologist. The pigeons were also able to apply their knowledge to novel images, showing the findings weren’t simply a result of rote memorization.