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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

#341
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.

Let’s say we do manage to develop a model that can replace radiologists in 20 years. But we stop training them today. What happens 15 years from now when we don’t have nearly enough radiologists.

I'm not saying it's a good idea to think like that, I'm just saying I'd wager he's right on thinking that AI will be in a good position in 20+ years.

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

#342
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might pay for a great AI diagnosis, but what matters is the diagnosis recognized by whoever pays for care. If you depend on insurance to pay for care, you're at the mercy of whatever AI they recognize. If you depend on a socialized medical care plan, you're at the mercy of whatever AI is approved by them. Paying for AI diagnosis on your own will only be helpful if you can shoulder the costs of treatment on your o…

At least you can dodge false diagnosis which is important especially when it can cause irreversible damage to your body

Under the assumption that AI has perfect accuracy. Perhaps you dodged the correct diagnosis and get to die 6 months later due to the lack of treatment. Might as well flip a coin.

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

#343
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risks in traditional medicine are standardized by standardized training and credentialing. We haven't established ways to evaluate the risks of transferring diagnostic responsibility to AIs. > All that is needed is an external actor to take the risk and show a step change improvement Who's going to benefit? Doctors might prioritize the security of their livelihood over access to care. Capital will certainly prioritiz…

Having paid $300 for a 10 minute doctor visit, in which I was confidently diagnosed incorrectly, it will not take much for me to minimize my doctor visits and take care into my own hands whenever possible. I will benefit from medical AI. There will soon come a point where I will pay a premium for my medical care to be reviewed by an AI, not the other way around.

If you’d trust generative AI over a physician, go in wide-eyed knowing that you’re still placing your trust in some group of people. You just don’t have an individual to blame if something goes wrong, but rather the entire supply chain that brings the model and its inference. Every link in that chain can shrug their shoulders and point to someone else.

This may be acceptable to you as an individual, but it’s not to me.

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

#344
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-care is being Karen since when?

"Cancer? Me? I'd like to speak to your manager!"

In reality it's always a good decision to seek a second independent assessment in case of diagnosis of severe illness.

People makes mistakes all the time, you don't want to be the one affected by their mistake.

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

#345

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…

Things happen slowly, then all at once. Many people think ChatGPT appeared out of nowhere a couple of years ago. In reality it was steadily improving for 8 years. Before then, LLMs were being developed for Word2Vec. Before then, Yoshua Bengio and colleagues proposed the first neural probabilistic language model, and introducing distributed word representations (precursors to embeddings). Before then we had Statistical NLP took hold, with n-gram models, hidden Markov models, and later phrase-based machine translation. Before that we had work on natural language processing (NLP) which began with symbolic AI and rule-based systems (e.g., ELIZA, 1966).

These are all stepping stones, and eventually the technology is mature enough to productise. You would be shocked by how good Tesla FSD is right now. It can easily take you on a cross country trip with almost zero human interactions.

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

#346
post #294
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is like saying that self-driving cars won't ever become a thing because someone behind the wheel needs to be to blame. Which is literally the case so far. No manufacturer has shown any willingness to take on the liability of self driving at any scale to date. Waymo has what? 700 cars on the road with the finances and lawyers of Google backing it. Let me know when the bean counters sign off on fleets in the mil…

> Waymo has what? 700 cars on the road ... They have over 2000 on the road and are growing: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/31/techcrunch-mobility-a-new-... Of course there's 200M+ personal vehicles registered in the US.

(brainfart)

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

#347
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how many people would want a second opinion (from a human) if they're presented with a bad discovery from a radiological exam and are then told it was fully automated. I have to admit if my life were on the line I might be that Karen.

A bad discovery probably means your exam will be read by someone qualified, like the surgeon/doctor tasked with correcting it. False negatives are far more problematic.

From my experience the best person to read these images is the medical imaging expert. The doctor who treats the underlying issue is qualified but it's not their core competence. They'll check of course but I don't think they generally have a strong basis to override the imaging expert.

If it's something serious enough a patient getting bad news will probably want a second opinion no matter who gave them the first one.

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

#348
post #346
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo has what? 700 cars on the road ... They have over 2000 on the road and are growing: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/31/techcrunch-mobility-a-new-... Of course there's 200M+ personal vehicles registered in the US.

(brainfart)

2000 is only 1 of every 100,000

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

#349

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…

Did the need raise through the use of silicon X ray detectors that improved the handling of images and reduced the time needed to get done imaging meaning that it made it faster, cheaper and less cumbersome, increasing the number of requests for X ray imaging?

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

#350

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…

Is there a risk that radiologists miss stuff because they get a pre-written report by AI that pushes them in a certain direction?

Maybe, but there is already that risk of some influence from other doctors, patients, nurses and general circumstances.

When an X-Ray is ordered, there is usually a suspected diagnosis in the order like "suspect sprain, pls exclude fracture", "suspect lung cancer". Patients will complain about symptoms or give the impression of a certain illness. Things like that already place a bias on the evaluation a radiologist does, but they are trained to look past that and be objective. No idea how often they succeed.

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