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Gee, Stan, you have caught me short. Unfortunately, I am an old man with CRS (can't remember shit). But I do not buy a stock unless I have researched it pretty thoroughly. And once it is bought I forget a lot of my research. What I recall is that Cytc wanted to make a computer program to accurately read a PAP smear slide. Couldn't be done because they are "dirty" with blood cells, etc. They had this product called thin prep, which was used to fix slides for other kinds of tests. And my research somewhere indicated that Thin Prep had been marketed for some time and was used in about 2000 labs. Well, instead of applying the gathered matter directly to a slide, they first "washed" it in Thin Prep, and it removed a lot of the "junk" and left more of the cells that actually were to be examined. It worked better, as FDA ruled. And a company called NPTH had a computer program that examined the slides done with Thin Prep, after those slides had been graded by technicians. 100% of the time the technician had said cancer was shown on the slide, the program said the same. But of the slides graded as "maybe cancer", only 94.something were graded as doubtful by the program. So the program can be used to "re-examine" slides, which is a required function, but that 6% of the doubtful slides it missed means it can't be used exclusively to say which slides humans need to reexamine. The program needs some "tweeking" to make it function better. I cannot recall if relation exists between NPTH and CYTC. |
