Medical Imaging Services
Many people with autism have exceptional visual perception, attention to detail, focus, and the ability to recognize patterns. These capabilities are ideal for employment in the field of medical imaging.
JoyDew trains members who possess these skills and traits, and have interest in working in this field, to do breast cancer pre-screening.
Working with experienced radiologist Dr. Margaret Bertrand, JoyDew has developed a series of training videos and other tools that teach members the fundamentals of breast cancer, mammography and the nomenclature and assessment categories used for interpreting mammograms.
Once they have completed the training and successfully passed the testing, the members get a hands-on learning experience that is specially tailored to meet the needs of learners on the autism spectrum. Using hardware and software donated by a major university, JoyDew members learn to manipulate tomographic images to identify suspicious findings, annotate them and assign the BIRAD assessment categories. Their work is reviewed by radiologists and trainers who provide feedback to help them learn to eliminate false-positives and constantly improve their accuracy.
JoyDew has recently contracted with a major university medical center to study the potential added value of radiological pre-screening analysis by autistic adults. This 3-phase project will first assess the members to ensure equivalency with medical students on case studies. They will then review images to determine their accuracy in pre-screening. Finally, they will review historical images to see how early they would have been able to detect confirmed cancer.
The data collected so far has shown that JoyDew members often detect small anomalies earlier than radiologists, potentially increasing the number of Stage 1 breast cancer diagnoses by 25%-35%.
