In nature, numerous animals share characteristics with humans, such as pigeons, its ability to find ways still remains for human use. However, a recent study makes people aware it’s more than that.

 
Richard Levenson, pathologists from the United States together with Edward Wasserman, psychologist from Edward Wasserman, trained pigeons to identify cancer.

 
During training, the researchers first demonstrated the microscope image of breast tissue to pigeon. Then, the researchers would reward them if they can peck correctly the corresponding colored buttons of healthy or cancerous tissues. Each training lasts for one hour and after 15 times of training, the doves can get the correct answer at the rate of 85%. And the rate can be increased to 99% if the reactions of the four pigeons from one group were collected together. In addition, these pigeons are also good at found the calcium deposits that showing white pitting in breast X-ray.

 
In fact, the identification of cancerous breast lumps in breast X-rays is quite difficult for humans for those features are very subtle and it’s challenging to detect them. Even for radiologist, the accuracy rate for evaluating the image is only 80%.

 
However, through this study, people have a new understanding of the dove’s vision and intelligence. They can recognize human faces, letters of the alphabet and can even identify Monet and Picasso paintings.

 

Although the test data seemed to be quite good, more time are needed for clinical application. Currently, researchers believe that these birds can play a useful role in the development of image analysis technologies. They developed a software to process medical images, allowing physicians to interpret them more easily.

 

The researchers also found in the experiment that the larger the gap between the number of objects contained in the picture group, the faster the pigeons to recognize and the higher the correct rate.

 

Such intelligence coupled with superior visual speed might give an answer to why those pigeons can distinguish the image of cancer.