Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high

>People outside radiology don't get why AI hasn't taken over

AI will probably never taking over, what we really need is AI working in tandem with radiologist and complementing their work to help with their busy schedule (or limited number of radiologist).

The OP title can also be changed to "Demand for human cardiologist is at an all-time high", and is still be true.

For example in CVDs detection cardiologist need to diagnose the patient properly, and if the patient not happy with the diagnostic he can get a second opinion from another cardiologist, but cardiologist number is very limited even more limited than radiologist.

For most of the countries in the world, only several hundreds to several thousands registered cardiologist per country, making the ratio about 1:100,000 cardiologist to population ratio.

People expecting cardiologist to go through their ECG readings but do you know that reading ECG is very cumbersome. Let's say you have 5 minutes ECG signals for the minimum requirement for AFib detection as per guideline. The standard ECG is 12-lead resulting in 12 x 5 x 60 = 3600 beats even for the minimum 5 minutes durations requirements (assuming 1 minute ECG equals to 60 beats). Then of course we have Holter ECG with typical 24-hour readings that increase the duration considerably and that's why almost all Holter reading now is automated. But current ECG automated detection has very low accuracy because their accuracy of their detection methods (statistics/AI/ML) are bounded by the beat detection algorithm for example the venerable Pan-Tompkins for the fiducial time-domain approach [1].

The cardiologist will rather spent their time for more interesting activities like teaching future cardiologists, performing expensive procedures like ICD or pacemaker, or having their once in a blue moon holidays instead of reading monotonous patients' ECGs.

I think this is why ECG reading automation with AI/ML is necessary to complement the cardiologist but the trick is to increase the sensitivity part of the accuracy to very high value preferably 100% so the missing potential patients is minimized for the expert and cardiologist in the loop exercise.

[1] Pan–Tompkins algorithm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan%E2%80%93Tompkins_algorithm

I sent a lady today to a radiologist for a core biopsy of a likely malignancy.

And a man to a radiologist for a lumbar perineural injection.

And a person to a radiologist for a subacromial bursa injection.

And a month ago I sent a woman to a radiologist to have adenomyosis embolised.

Also talked to a patient today who I will probably send to a radiologist to have a postnephrectomy urinary leak embolised.

Is an LLM going to do that ?

There is the another issue.

If AI commoditises a skill, competent people with options will just shift to another skill while offloading the commoditised skill to someone else.

Due to automated ECG interpretation built into every machine, reimbursement has plummeted. So I have let my ECG interpretation skills rust while focusing on my neurology and movement disorder skills.They are fun ... I also did part of a master's in AI decades ago ( Prolog, Lisp , good times, machine vision, good times...)

So now if someone needs a ECG, I am probably going to send them to a cardiologist who will do a ECG, Holter, Echo, Stress Echo etc. Income for the nice friendly cardiologist, extra cost and time for the patient and the health system.

I can imagine like food deserts, entire AI deserts in medicine that nobody want to work in. A bit like geriatrics, rural medicine and psychiatry these days.

There's some sort of category error here. Not every doctor is that type of doctor. A radiologist could be a remote interpretation service staffed by humans or by AI, just as sending off blood for a blood test is done in a laboratory.

Doesn't have to be "perfect accuracy". It just has to beat the accuracy of the doctor you would have gone to otherwise.

Which is often a very, very low bar.

What do you call a doctor who was last in his class in medical school? A doctor.

So, you need a moral support human? Like a big plushie, but more alive?