Help us beat cancer – with just a few clicks of your mouse

I believe some worked examples depicting cell boundaries and the correct interpretation would help us to “tune in/hone” our judgements. If all samples were taken at identical magnification, so that absolute dimensions were accurate, slide to slide i.e. not zoomed in any way. This recognition could almost certainly be automated. It’s very similar tech/software to Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

This is a great idea, I’ve tried to go to the website but it just ends up as a blank page and nothin loads. Are there any browser specifications for it to work?

Just started using this. Glad to see some response to Laura’s questions. I think a skip button would be useful, sometimes it is really hard to make a judgement.

Maybe a couple of extra “test” slides would be good too with the “correct” decisions. The examples given are very different to a lot of the slides.

Firstly, sincere thanks to you all for getting involved in Cell Slider and taking the time to provide this useful feedback. With your help we have already reached over 90,000 classifications!

To answer your first query Laura, healthy cells, such as the tissue and blood cells you might be seeing, will have minimal staining-and you may see this from time to time. However, the staining is typically found in cancer cells, and the brighter the stain the more serious the cancer.

Thomas, thank you for your positive comment; we’re glad you like it.

Several of you have mentioned the lack of reset button, which we were really interested to note. This was a decision based on research provided by the Citizen Science Alliance (the team we worked with to create this Project) and was Beta tested to good effect. The reason is that we’re keen for people to keep going through the site – the more classifications the better, and we have all sorts of activities that take place behind the scenes to ensure that we get the best science possible for our pathologists.

That’s not to say that this won’t change in future, and your feedback has been added to our Project documentation. I hope this helps and if you have any more suggestions by all means continue to post comments here.

Amy Carton
Cancer Research UK

I agree, we need a re-set or re-do button and a “skip” button would also be nice as Laura suggested.

Sam

I like some of Laura’s suggestions and wondered why cell slider do not have a re-set button on it like galaxy Zoo 4 does…if one made a mistake half way thur one image can one redo the image from the start by using a re-set button…Galaxy Zoo 4 uses one.

This is a very good thing to help people out with cancer.

Is there somewhere to ask questions/suggestions about the cell-slider site? I have started using it but the faq doesn’t help with some questions. For example, if cells are stained yellow, does that mean that they are, by default, irregular or does the yellow stain also stain blood cells sometimes? Also, it would be helpful to have a ‘skip’ button for slides which you are not sure about (or ones which occasionally do not load properly).

I note your recent campaign highlighting cancer research. In my late wife’s case it took the hospital one month to diagnose recurrent cancer, regardless of obvious signs such as bleeding. And even after that there was no hurry to operate as the tumour was said to be ‘localised’. But as it turned out at the operation almost two months after being admitted to hospital, it was not localised – in fact, the cancer had spread significantly and wrapped itself around a major artery. As the aim of cancer research is to benefit patients, for that potential to be fulfilled there needs to be a change in culture in hospitals like St George’s (Tooting) with regard to the urgency and competency in diagnosing cancer or recurrent cancer and for doctors to be sufficiently knowledgable to accurately interpret scans.