Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

Post by bilbo0s » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

stonemetal12 wrote: post #45

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…

>Human radiologists spend a minority of their time on diagnostics and the majority on other activities, like talking to patients and fellow clinicians. How often do they talk to patients? Every time I have ever had an x-ray, I have never talked to a radiologist. Fellow clinicians? Train the xray tech up a bit more. If the mote is 'talking to people' that is a mote that doesn't need an MD, or at least not a full speci…

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

ViktorRay wrote: post #30

One thing people aren't talking about is liability. At the end of the day if the radiologist makes an error the radiologist gets sued. If AI replaces the radiologist then it is OpenAI or some other AI company that will get sued each and every time the AI model makes a mistake. No AI company wants to be on the hook for that. So what will happen? Simple. AI will always remain just a tool to assist doctors. But there wi…

Post by daxfohl » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

roncesvalles wrote: post #48

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…

I only came to this thread to say that this is completely untrue: >Human radiologists spend a minority of their time on diagnostics and the majority on other activities, like talking to patients and fellow clinicians. The vast majority of radiologists do nothing other than: come in (or increasingly, stay at home), sit down at a computer, consume a series of medical images while dictating their findings, and then go h…

Post by bigfudge » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #41

addcommitpush wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had absolute perfect performance at zero cost, you would not need a radiologist. The current "workflow" is primary care physician (or specialist) -> radiology tech that actually does the measurement thing -> radiologist for interpretation/diagnosis -> primary care physician (or specialist) for treatment. If you have perfect diagnosis, it could be primary care physician (or specialist) -> radiology tech -> ML…

Nope. To understand why, you would really need to take a good read of the average PCP's malpractice policy. The policy for a specialist would be even more strict. You would need to change insurance policies before your workflow was even possible from a liability perspective. Basically, the insurer wants, "a throat to choke", so to speak. Handing up a model to them isn't going to cut it anymore than handing up Hitachi…

Post by nenenejej » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

lnenad wrote: post #7

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.

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.