Pigeons, long associated with foraging for food on city sidewalks, have a host of other abilities to add to their resumes, so to speak. Chief among them is their ability to distinguish microscopic images of cancerous tissue from non-cancerous tissue in human breast scans.
Researchers from the University of Iowa trained the pigeons for over two weeks — far faster than it takes most folks to learn to drive, read or even speak — to distinguish between the two types of tissue. Likewise, the researchers also taught the pigeons to correctly identify tumors in unseen microscope images and to classify mammograms.
During training, researchers rewarded the pigeons when they correctly identified cancerous tumors with a food pellet. By the completion of two weeks, the pigeons developed an 85% rate of identification accuracy.
Reportedly, this is not all that unusual as pigeons are adept at so much more than they would have you believe. Pigeons can reportedly distinguish individuals from other individuals, they can identify letters in the alphabet, and they can even distinguish between the works of Picasso and Monet. Pigeons have also been employed in the identification of misshapen pharmaceuticals mixed among batches of regularly shaped pharmaceuticals — perhaps making them the unexpected savants of the bird world.
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