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Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

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Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#31

Post by skadamou »

kstrauser wrote: post #18
maz1b wrote: post #8

As a doctor and full stack engineer, I would never go into radiology or seek further training in it. (obviously) AI is going to augment radiologists first, and eventually, it will start to replace them. And existing radiologists will transition into stuff like interventional radiology or whatever new areas will come into the picture in the future.

What’s your take on pharmacists? To my naive eyes, that seems like a certainty for replacement. What extra value does human judgement bring to their work?

I'm not a doc or a pharmacist (though I am in med school) and I'm sure there are areas that AI could do some of a pharmacists job but on the outpatient side they do things like answering questions for patients and helping them interpret instructions that I don't think we want AI to do... or at least I really doubt an AIs ability to gauge how well someone is understanding instructions and augment how it explains something based on that assessment... on the inpatient side, I have seen pharmacists help physicians grapple with the pros and cons of certain treatments and make judgement calls about dosing that I think it would be hard to trust an AI to do because there is no "right" answer really. It's about balancing trade offs.

IDK, these are just limitations - people that really believe in AI will tell you there is basically nothing it can't do... eventually. I guess it's just a matter of how long you want to wait for eventually to come.

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#32

Post by cko »

kstrauser wrote: post #18
maz1b wrote: post #8

As a doctor and full stack engineer, I would never go into radiology or seek further training in it. (obviously) AI is going to augment radiologists first, and eventually, it will start to replace them. And existing radiologists will transition into stuff like interventional radiology or whatever new areas will come into the picture in the future.

What’s your take on pharmacists? To my naive eyes, that seems like a certainty for replacement. What extra value does human judgement bring to their work?

I am a pharmacist who dabbles in web dev. We should easily be replaced because all of our work on checking pill images and drug interactions are actually already automated, or the software already tells us everything.

If every doctor agreed to electronically prescribe (instead of calling it in, or writing it down) using one single standard / platform / vendor, and all pharmacy software also used the same platform / standard, then our jobs are definitely redundant.

I worked at a hospital where basically doctors and pharmacists and nurses all use the same software and most of the time we click approve approve approve without data entry.

Of course we also make IVs and compounds by hand, but that's a small part of our job.

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#33

Post by stonemetal12 »

lomase wrote: post #19
lnenad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume the last person that entered their radiologist training started then and the training lasts 5 years. At the end of their training the year is 2021 and they are around 31. So that means they will practice medicine for cca 30 years which would put the calendar at around 2051. I'd wager in 25 years we'd get there so I think his opinion still has a large percentage of being correct.

Why you write 2021? It clearly says 2016. I mean if you change the data to fit your argument you will always make it look correct. Lets assume we stop in 2016 like he said, where do we get the 1000 radiologist the US needs a year?

> the training lasts 5 years. At the end of their training the year is 2021

The training lasts 5 years, 2021 - 5 = 2016 If they stopped accepting people into the radiologist program but let people already in to finish, then you would stop having new radiologist in 2021.

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#34

Post by [deleted] »

lomase wrote: post #19
lnenad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume the last person that entered their radiologist training started then and the training lasts 5 years. At the end of their training the year is 2021 and they are around 31. So that means they will practice medicine for cca 30 years which would put the calendar at around 2051. I'd wager in 25 years we'd get there so I think his opinion still has a large percentage of being correct.

Why you write 2021? It clearly says 2016. I mean if you change the data to fit your argument you will always make it look correct. Lets assume we stop in 2016 like he said, where do we get the 1000 radiologist the US needs a year?

[deleted]

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#35

Post by thevillagechief »

donnfelker wrote: post #16
maz1b wrote: post #8

As a doctor and full stack engineer, I would never go into radiology or seek further training in it. (obviously) AI is going to augment radiologists first, and eventually, it will start to replace them. And existing radiologists will transition into stuff like interventional radiology or whatever new areas will come into the picture in the future.

There's a number of you (engineer + doctor), though quite rare. I have a few friends who are engineers as well as doctors. You're like unicorns in your field. The Neo and Morpheus of the medical industry - you can see things and understand things that most people cant in your typical field (medicine). Kudos to you!

This was actually my dream career path when I was younger. Unfortunately there's just no way I would have afforded the time and resources to pursue both, and I'd never heard of Biomedical Engineering where I grew up.

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#36

Post by Joker_vD »

So instead of having to train and employ radiologists, we will train and employ radiologists and pay for the AI inference. Excuse me, but how is this beneficial in any way? It's trivially more expensive, and the result has the same quality? And productivity is also the same?

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#37

Post by lomase »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #33
lomase wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you write 2021? It clearly says 2016. I mean if you change the data to fit your argument you will always make it look correct. Lets assume we stop in 2016 like he said, where do we get the 1000 radiologist the US needs a year?

> the training lasts 5 years. At the end of their training the year is 2021 The training lasts 5 years, 2021 - 5 = 2016 If they stopped accepting people into the radiologist program but let people already in to finish, then you would stop having new radiologist in 2021.

'people should stop training radiologists now'

That sentence and what you wrote are not 100% the same.

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#38

Post by chrisgd »

Joker_vD wrote: post #36

So instead of having to train and employ radiologists, we will train and employ radiologists and pay for the AI inference. Excuse me, but how is this beneficial in any way? It's trivially more expensive, and the result has the same quality? And productivity is also the same?

A lot of the tech in the space is workflow related right now. The AI scans triage to the top those cases that are deemed clinically significant, potentially saving time. I can’t tell you it isn’t solely responding to the referring doctor’s urgent stamp though.

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#39

Post by vel0city »

djoldman wrote: post #10

> Three things explain this. First,... Second, attempts to give models more tasks have run into legal hurdles: regulators and medical insurers so far are reluctant to approve or cover fully autonomous radiology models. Third, even when they do diagnose accurately, models replace only a small share of a radiologist’s job. Human radiologists spend a minority of their time on diagnostics and the majority on other activi…

As a patient I don't think I've ever even talked to any radiologist that actually analyzed my imaging. Most of the times my family or I have had imaging done the imaging is handled by a tech who just knows how to operate the machines while the actual diagnostic work gets farmed out to remote radiologists who type up an analysis. I don't even think the other doctors I actually see ever directly talk to those radiologists.

Is this uncommon in the rest of the US?

Re: Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

#40

Post by lomase »

jonas21 wrote: post #29
lomase wrote: post #5

In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton – computer scientist and Turing Award winner – declared that ‘people should stop training radiologists now’. If we had followed every AI evengelist sugestion the world would have collapsed.

People love to bring this up, and it was a silly thing to say -- particularly since he didn't seem to understand that radiologists only spend a small part of their time reading scans. But he said it in the context of a Q&A session that happened to be recorded. Unless you're a skilled politician who can give answers without actually saying anything, you're going to say silly things once in a while in unscripted settin…

Many of us have changed opinions after seeing how the tech does not scale.

At the time? I would say he was a AI evangelist.

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