What I'm up to this summer.

[eyefragment]

The Haltman has asked about what my research is this summer, and I promised him I'd post it to LJ. Ergo, this exists.  If anyone else is interested in reading it, you're welcome to do so, and I'd be happy to hear feedback, but I'm mostly just making this post to satisfy the afforementioned Haltman's curiosity.

Comments

[sniffnoy]

Yayayayayay!

So do *all* the features you're looking at come from these guy's ratings, and the problem is just that estimations of malignancy vary? Or do the non-malignancy features come from something more objective? Or what? That's not too clear.

[eyefragment]

The bad news: These guys outline each nodule, and that's what we're using to determine what the nodule _is_. Some radiologists make quick and dirty outlines, while others make really precise ones.

The good news: Beyond that, we ourselves calculate a bunch of additional features (63 of 'em, IIRC). I don't know that we're even using the other ratings in our classifier for malignancy (if not, we should!).

To answer your question though, their estimations of everything varies. And this is part of the problem. What one radiologist thinks is "highly spiculated" might be what another radiologist thinks is "somewhat spiculated," even though spiculation is definitely a measurable thing. This is a highly problematic dataset, but hey, it's waht we've got to work with, and the problematicness is what makes it an interesting thing to research.

[sniffnoy]

Hm, so these other things they mark, you are trying to predict these from your own additional features along with the malignancy? Or what?

[eyefragment]

We're trying to predict all of them, though I think Malignancy is the only important one. In any case, now that I think about it, we really shouldn't use the non-malginancy features that the radiologists gave in building our classifier for malignancy, since we wouldn't have access to those in a real world example.