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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Let's imagine stomach cancer was caused by the 'mega burger' sold by walmart. 6 months after eating said mega burger, you are 100% guaranteed a diagnosis of stomach cancer.

If that were the case, AI would really struggle to predict this 3 years ahead. The AI has to make a decent prediction of who will shop at walmart, who will buy the mega burger, and when they will eat it.

So, the fact AI can make a decent prediction 3 years out suggests that if there is a 'trigger event' that causes some/all stomach cancers, that the trigger event is either very predictable, or happens more than 3 years before diagnosis.

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My dad had esophageal cancer and until he was diagnosed with stage 4 with multiple metastases he didn't really have symptoms. He'd had a lower appetite and lost weight in the months leading up to his diagnosis, but thought that was just lifestyle and diet changes finally clicking. Esophageal cancer with multiple metastases is usually fatal at about four months after diagnosis (my dad died at 3.5 months after diagnosis).

But you don't go from no cancer to dead in 4 months, the cancer is there for years. This research is finding signals from blood tests that correlate to cancer long before it has visible effects. The trigger event you're theorizing is just cancer at a lower level

Most likely the last one. As I understand it, our diagnosis techniques for cancer are very limited and basically only at the “omg, that’s obviously cancer” phase of progression (ie it has to be noticeable so that we can do a biopsy). Even our imaging techniques are limited because surgeries can discover that the cancer is worse than what was originally thought. In some cases we can catch the cancer very early, but even in those cases it’s a mixture of luck and we don’t actually know how long the cancer was actually growing for (“early” just means early enough for treatment to be very effective).

At least that’s my external highly amateur understanding of the situation.

Wouldn’t it be closer to eating the mega burger regularly, like every week? In which case if you have that habit, it could easily be predicted that you would continue.

But the actual model seems simpler, measuring something like the obesity from your mega burger habit.

While paper is paywalled, it doesn’t sound that sophisticated.

The blurb mentions the prediction requires a couple of measurements that aren’t usually taken like stomach and waist circumference.

From my experience with building models (in other domains), the key to break through is very often new data that previously wasn’t considered as it wasn’t easily available.

> requires a couple of measurements that aren’t usually taken like stomach and waist circumference

That was used in the previous research tool (M-BERET) but presumably not their new one.

I’m not sure what the point of this comment is. Nobody thinks this is how stomach cancer works.

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