Knowledge is slower than innovation

Imaging technologies are nowadays so good at peering inside our bodies they may have surpassed our capacity to interpret the results. Many findings are today what we doctors call “incidentalomas”, that is, false positives; for instance, images that look like cancer but after surgery turn out to be benign. We see “smaller things”, and smaller, and smaller, but we are unable to correlate them so quickly to what is normal and what is not. This should be a concern for healthcare professionals.

The same happens with biotech and diagnostics. The new detection techniques such as proteomics have made great progress in associating particular biomarkers to certain diseases, but we still don’t know how often those same markers turn up in non-diseases outcomes. Knowledge moves forward significantly slower than technology.