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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

#231

I'm an interventional radiologist with a master's in computer science. People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over. Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. Will radiologists be replaced? Almost certainly the answer is no. Why not? Medical risk. Unless the law changes, a radiologist will have to sign off on each imaging report. So say yo…

But this indicates lack of incentives to reduce healthcare costs by optimisation. If AI can do something well enough , and AI + humans surpass humans leading to costs reductions/ increased throughput this should be reflected in the workflows. I feel that human processes have inertia and for lack of a better word, gatekeepers feel that new, novel approaches should be adopted slowly and which is why we are not seeing t…

Or, maybe artifacts justify prices less so than amounts of souls bothered will. Robotic medical diagnosis could save costs, but it could suppress customers' appetite too, in which case, like you said, commercial healthcare providers would not be incentivized to offer it.

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

#232

I'm an interventional radiologist with a master's in computer science. People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over. Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. Will radiologists be replaced? Almost certainly the answer is no. Why not? Medical risk. Unless the law changes, a radiologist will have to sign off on each imaging report. So say yo…

But this indicates lack of incentives to reduce healthcare costs by optimisation. If AI can do something well enough , and AI + humans surpass humans leading to costs reductions/ increased throughput this should be reflected in the workflows. I feel that human processes have inertia and for lack of a better word, gatekeepers feel that new, novel approaches should be adopted slowly and which is why we are not seeing t…

Remember, the AI doesn’t create anything, so you add risk potentially to the patient outcome and perhaps make advancement more difficult.

My late wife had to have a stent placed in a vein in her brain to relieve cranial pressure. We had to travel to to New York for an interventional radiologist and team to fish a 7 inch stent and balloon from her thigh up.

At the time, we had to travel to NYC, and the doctor was one of a half dozen who could do the procedure in the US. Who’s going to train the future physician the skills needed to develop the procedure?

For stuff like this, I feel like AI is potentially going to erase certain human knowledge.

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

#233

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…

Where we're too optimistic is with technology that demos impressively, but which has 10,000 potentially-fatal edge cases. Self-driving cars and radiology interpretation are both in this category.

When there are relatively few dangerous edge cases, technology often works better than we expect. TikTok's recommendation algorithm and Shazam are in this category.

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

#234

I'm an interventional radiologist with a master's in computer science. People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over. Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. Will radiologists be replaced? Almost certainly the answer is no. Why not? Medical risk. Unless the law changes, a radiologist will have to sign off on each imaging report. So say yo…

Doesn't most of the stuff a radiologist does get double checked anyways by the doctor that orders the scan in the first place? I guess not a more typical screening scan like a mammogram. However, for anything else like a CT, MRI, Xray, etc. I expect the doctor/NP that ordered it in the first place will want to take a look at the image itself and not just the report on the image.

Not meaningfully. Beyond basics like a large tumor, a bone break, etc, there’s alot too it.

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

#235

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…

A lot of people in the industry really underestimated the difficulty in getting self driving cars be effective. It is relatively easy to get a staged demo together, but getting a trustworthy product out there is really hard.

We've seen this with all of the players, with many dropping out due to the challenges.

Having said that, there are several that are fielded right now, with varying degrees of autonomy. Obviously Waymo has been operating in small-ish geofences for a while, but they are managed >200% annual growth readily. Zoox just started offering fully autonomous drives in Vegas.

And even Tesla is offering a service, albeit with safety monitors/drivers. Tesla Semi isn't autonomous at all, but appears ready to go into volume production next year too.

Your prediction will look a lot better by 2030.

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

#236

I'm an interventional radiologist with a master's in computer science. People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over. Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. Will radiologists be replaced? Almost certainly the answer is no. Why not? Medical risk. Unless the law changes, a radiologist will have to sign off on each imaging report. So say yo…

So you studied like 8 years of med school [1] and 2 years of CS? Damn! That’s a lot.

[1] I don’t know the US system so it’s just a guess

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

#237

I'm an interventional radiologist with a master's in computer science. People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over. Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. Will radiologists be replaced? Almost certainly the answer is no. Why not? Medical risk. Unless the law changes, a radiologist will have to sign off on each imaging report. So say yo…

But this indicates lack of incentives to reduce healthcare costs by optimisation. If AI can do something well enough , and AI + humans surpass humans leading to costs reductions/ increased throughput this should be reflected in the workflows. I feel that human processes have inertia and for lack of a better word, gatekeepers feel that new, novel approaches should be adopted slowly and which is why we are not seeing t…

Three things explain this. First, while models beat humans on benchmarks, the standardized tests designed to measure AI performance, they struggle to replicate this performance in hospital conditions. Most tools can only diagnose abnormalities that are common in training data, and models often don’t work as well outside of their test conditions. 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 activities, like talking to patients and fellow clinicians

From the article

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

#238

I'm an interventional radiologist with a master's in computer science. People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over. Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. Will radiologists be replaced? Almost certainly the answer is no. Why not? Medical risk. Unless the law changes, a radiologist will have to sign off on each imaging report. So say yo…

So you studied like 8 years of med school [1] and 2 years of CS? Damn! That’s a lot. [1] I don’t know the US system so it’s just a guess

4 years undergrad (CS, math, bio)

4 years med school

2 years computer science

6 years of residency (intern year, 4 years of DR, 1 year of IR)

16 years...

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

#239

> 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…

Saw radiologists at a recent visit in a hospital.

Do you have some kind of source? This seems unlikely.

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

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that in order to interpret imaging for a US based patient, any physician needs to have a US medical license?

Any physician with a medical license in the US can sign off on an Indian physician's work. Or hundreds of them.

This already does happen for nighthawk coverage for example where a non-US radiologist will provide a wet read and then a US rad will sign off. The US rad will always bear the liability however.
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