91–100 of 486 posts
It's interesting to see people fighting so hard to preserve these jobs. Do people want to work that badly? If a magic wand can do everything radiologists can do, would we embrace it or invent reasons to occupy 40+ hours a week of time anyway? If a magic wand, might be on the horizon, shouldn't we all be fighting to find it and even finding ways to tweak our behaviors to maximize the amount of free time that could be…
"Human radiologists spend a minority of their time on diagnostics and the majority on other activities, like talking to patients and fellow clinicians"
I've had the misfortune of dealing with a radiologist or two this year. They spent 10-20 minutes talking about the imaging and the results with me. What they said was very superficial and they didn't have answers to several of the questions I asked.
I went over the images and pathology reports with ChatGPT and it was much better informed, did have answers for my questions, and had additional questions I should have been asking. I've used ChatGPT's information on the rare occasions when doctors deign to speak with me and it's always been right. Me, repeating conclusions and observations ChatGPT made, to my doctors, has twice changed the course of my treatment this year, and the doctors have never said anything I've learned from ChatGPT is wrong. By contrast, my doctors are often wrong, forgetful, or mistaken. I trust ChatGPT way more than them.
Good image recognition models probably are much better than human radiologists already and certainly could be vastly better. One obstacle this post mentions - AI models "struggle to replicate this performance in hospital conditions", is purely a choice. If HMOs trained models on real data then this would no longer be the case, if it is now, which I doubt.
I think it's pretty clearly doctors, and their various bureaucratic and legal allies, defending their legal monopoly so they can provide worse and slower healthcare at higher prices, so they continue to make money, at the small cost of the sick getting worse and dying.
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?
A) The night before, a woman in her 40's came in to the ER suffering a major psychological breakdown of some kind (she was vague to protect patient privacy). The Dr prescribed a major sedative, and the software alerted that they didn't have a negative pregnancy test because this drug is not approved for pregnant women and so should not be given. However, in my wife's clinical judgement- honed by years of training, reading papers, going to conferences, actual work experience and just talking to colleagues- the risk to a (potential) fetus from the drug was less than the risk to a (potential) fetus from mom going through an untreated mental health episode and so she approved the drug and overrode the alert.
B) A prescriber had earlier in that week written a script for Tylenol to be administered "PR" (per-rectum) rather than PRN (per requisite need). PR Tylenol is a perfectly valid thing that is sometimes the correct choice, and was stocked by the hospital for that reason. But my wife recognized that this wasn't one of the cases where that was necessary, and called the nurse to call the prescriber to get that changed so the nurse wouldn't have to give them a Tylenol suppository. This time there were no alerts, no flags from the software, it was just her looking at it and saying "in my clinical judgement, this isn't the right administration for this situation, and will make things worse".
So someone- with expensively trained (and probably licensed) judgement- will still need to look over the results of this AI pharmacist and have the power to override its decisions. And that means that they will need to have enough time per case to build a mental model of the situation in their brain, figure out what is happening, and override if necessary. And it needs to be someone different from the person filling out the Rx, for Swiss cheese model of safety reasons.
Congratulations, we've just described a pharmacist.
What we need is a mandate for AI transformation of Radiology: Radiologists must be required to use AI every day on X% of scans, their productivity must double with the use of AI or they'll get fired, etc. To quote CEOs everywhere: AI is a transformative technology unlike any we've ever seen in our careers, and we must embrace it in a desperate FOMO way, anything else is unacceptable.
I can't even tell if it's sarcasm anymore
It's clearly satire with the little jabs like this.
When Tesla demoed (via video) self-driving in 2016 with a claim "The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself" and then when they unveiled Semi in 2017 - I tweeted out and honestly thought that trucking industry is changed forever and it doesn't make sense to be starting in trucking industry. It's almost end of 2025 and either nothing out of it o…
Look at Waymo, not Robotaxi. Waymo is essentially the self driving vision I had as a kid, and ridership is growing exponentially as they expand. It's also very safe if you believe their statistics[0]. I think there's a saying about overestimating stuff in the short term and underestimating stuff in the long term that seems to apply here, though the radiologist narrative was definitely wrong. [0] https://waymo.com/saf…
It's interesting to see people fighting so hard to preserve these jobs. Do people want to work that badly? If a magic wand can do everything radiologists can do, would we embrace it or invent reasons to occupy 40+ hours a week of time anyway? If a magic wand, might be on the horizon, shouldn't we all be fighting to find it and even finding ways to tweak our behaviors to maximize the amount of free time that could be…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at Waymo, not Robotaxi. Waymo is essentially the self driving vision I had as a kid, and ridership is growing exponentially as they expand. It's also very safe if you believe their statistics[0]. I think there's a saying about overestimating stuff in the short term and underestimating stuff in the long term that seems to apply here, though the radiologist narrative was definitely wrong. [0] https://waymo.com/saf…
I agree with both comments here. I wonder what the plausibility of fully autonomous trucking is in the next 10-30 years... Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.
Their workday consists of conversations, questions and reading. Something LLMs more than excel at doing, tirelessly and in huge volumes.
And if radiologists are still the top bet due to image recognition being so much hotter, then why not add dermatologists to the extinction roster? They only ever look at regular light images, it should be a lower hanging fruit.
(I'm aware of the nuances that make automation of these work roles hard, I'm just trying to shine some light on the mystery of radiologists being perceived as the perennial easy target)