Pigeons can be trained to spot cancer on medical images, a difficult visual task that can take human doctors years to master. Dr. Ed Wasserman , a Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa, has taken his years of study of the remarkable visual systems of the ordinary pigeon, and applied it to cancer pathology.

Pigeons were trained for two weeks, in which they were shown pictures of cancerous and normal tissues. The birds pecked in one place if they saw cancer, and another when they didn't, and were rewarded when they pecked correctly. After two weeks, they were reliably able to spot cancer in new images better than 80% of the time.

Dr Wasserman hopes to use the pigeons to help understand what are the most important diagnostic features in the images, and, perhaps, even find new ways of training doctors by finding out how pigeons learn best.

Related Links

- Paper in PLOS One

- PLOS release

- University of Iowa release

- New York Times story

- BBC News story