With a good umpire, a pitch off the outside corner is a ball. But the next at bat, even with the same ump, it might be strike three, you're out. The differences between malignant and benign tissue can be subtle.
Interpretations are often subjective.
It's a question that occurred several years ago to Dr. Michael Becich , a pathologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center . CBIR does essentially what pathologists do when they flip through the pages of a reference book, but objectively, more comprehensively and in a matter of seconds. Instead of using text, where you'd go to a database and say show me your images of prostate cancer, for instance, CBIR uses computerized image-classification to create image signatures. For an unknown sample, the image signature then acts as the search key. It can't cover the range of examples we can build into a database.