Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by trebligdivad » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

christianqchung wrote: post #70

kklisura wrote: post #54

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…

Waymo still have the ability to remotely deal with locations the AI has problems; I'd love to know what type of percentage of trips need to do that now. Having that escape together with only doing tested areas makes their job a LOT easier. (Not that it's bad - it's a great thing and I wish for it here!)

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

#132

Post by thunderfork » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #121

mandevil wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is a clinical pharmacist at a hospital. I am a SWE working on AI/ML related stuff. We've talked about this a lot. She thinks that the current generation of software is not a replacement for what she does now, and finds the alerts they provide mostly annoying. The last time this came up, she gave me two examples: A) The night before, a woman in her 40's came in to the ER suffering a major psychological breakdo…

> And it needs to be someone different from the person filling out the Rx, for Swiss cheese model of safety reasons. This is something I question. If you go to a specialist, and the specialist judges that you need surgery, he can just schedule and perform the surgery himself. There’s no other medical professional whose sole job is to second-guess his clinical judgment. If you want that, you can always get a second op…

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

#133

Post by whydoineedthis » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

I personally think we are in the pre-broadband era of AI. That is, what is currently being built will contribute to some AI dot-com 1.0 bubble burst, but after that there will be some advancements in it's distribution model that will allow it to thrive and infiltrate our society at a core level. Right now it's a bunch of dreamers building the pets.com that no one asked for, but after all the competition is shaken off, there will definitely be some clear winners, and maybe an Amazon.com of sorts for AI that people will adopt.

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

#134

Post by MengerSponge » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

addcommitpush wrote: post #26

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…

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…

If we're talking utopian visions, we can do better than dreaming of transforming unstructured data into actionable business insights. Let's talk about what is meaningfully possible: Who assumes legal liability? The ML vendor?

PCPs don't have the training and aren't paid enough for that exposure.

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

#135

Post by CamperBob2 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

jmhmd wrote: post #128

CamperBob2 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotes like this are informative as far as they go, but they don't say anything at all about the technique itself. Like your story about the fonts used for labeling, essentially all of the drawbacks cited by the article come down to inadequate or inappropriate training methods and data. Fix that, which will not be hard from a purely-technical standpoint, and you will indeed be able to replace radiologists. Sorry,…

The issue is that in medicine, much like automobiles, unexpected failure modes may be catastrophic to individual people. “Fixing” failure modes like the above comment is not difficult from a technical standpoint, that’s true, but you can only fix it once you’ve identified it, and at that point you may have a dead person/people. That’s why AI in medicine and self driving cars are so unlike AI for programming or writin…

Yet self-driving cars are already competitive with human drivers, safety-wise, given responsible engineering and deployment practices.

Like medicine, self-driving is more of a seemingly-unsolvable political problem than a seemingly-unsolvable technical one. It's not entirely clear how we'll get there from here, but it will be solved. Would you put money on humans still driving themselves around 25-50 years from now? I wouldn't.

These stories about AI failures are similar to calling for banning radiation therapy machines because of the Therac-25. We can point and laugh at things like the labeling screwup that pjdesno mentioned -- and we should! -- but such cases are not a sound basis for policymaking.

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

#136

Post by jampekka » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 6:22 PM UTC

basisword wrote: post #99

pkdpic wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember Bill Gates said: "We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years".

Not Musk. He promised full autonomy within 3 years about 10 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

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

#137

Post by xboxnolifes » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 6:36 PM UTC

samweb3 wrote: post #87

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…

This isn't going to generate free time. Its going to generate homelessness and increasing wealth inequality.

Our current economic system does not support improved productivity leading to less working (with equal wealth) for the working class.

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

#138

Post by daxfohl » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

quadragenarian wrote: post #113

daxfohl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these the ones making 500K? Sounds like more of an assistance job than an MD.

Radiologists are often the ones who are the "brains" of medical diagnosis. The primary care or ER physician gets the patient scanned, and the radiologist scrolls through hundreds if not thousands of images, building a mental model of the insides of the patient's body and then based on the tens of thousands of cases they've reviewed in the past, as well as deep and intimate human anatomical knowledge, attempts to synt…

Makes sense. Knowing nothing about it, I was picturing a tech sitting at home looking at pictures saying "yup, there's a spot", "nope, no spot here".

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

#139

Post by ath3nd » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

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

#140

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #98

bilbo0s wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let’s suppose I go to the doctor and get tested for HIV. There isn’t a specialist staring at my blood through a microscope looking for HIV viruses, they put my blood in a machine and the machine tells them, positive or negative. There is a false positive rate and a false negative rate for the test. There’s no fundamental reason you couldn’t put a CT scan into a machine the same way.

Pretty much everything has false positives and false negatives. Everything can be reduced to this.

Human radiologists have them. They can miss things: false negative. They can misdiagnose things: false positive.

Interviews have them. A person can do well, be hired and turn out to be bad employee: false positive. A person who would have been a good employee can do badly due to situational factors and not get hired: false negative.

The justice system has them. An innocent person can be judged guilty: false positive. A guilty person can be judged innocent: false negative.

All policy decisions are about balancing out the false negatives against the false positives.

Medical practice is generally obsessed with stamping out false negatives: sucks to be you if you're the doctor who straight up missed something. False positives are avoided as much as possible by defensive wording that avoids outright affirming things. You never say the patient has the disease, you merely suggest that this finding could mean that the patient has the disease.

Hiring is expensive and firing even more so depending on jurisdiction, so corporations want to minimize false positives as much as humanly possible. If they ever hire anyone, they want to be sure it's absolutely the right person for them. They don't really care that they might miss out on good people.

There are all sorts of political groups trying to tip the balance of justice in favor of false negatives or false positivies. Some would rather see guilty go free than watch a single innocent be punished by mistake. Others don't care about innocents at all. I could cite some but it'd no doubt lead to controversy.