431–440 of 486 posts
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…
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Yeah, I have no idea if Waymo will ever be a rural thing honestly, mostly for economic reasons. I'm skeptical it would get serious suburban usage this decade too. But for major cities where less than 80% of people own cars, test time doesn't seem to be making a difference. They've been expanding in Austin and Atlanta, seemingly with less prep time than Phoenix and San Fran.
Atlanta seems to be a bit contradictory to some of your other thoughts. The city itself is relatively small. A vast majority of area population lives distributed across the MSA, and it can create hellish traffic. I remember growing up thinking 1+ hour commutes were just a fact of life for everyone commuting from the suburbs. Not sure what car ownership looks like, and I haven’t been in years, but I’d imagine it’s sti…
I said "less than 80% car ownership", not "80% do not own a car". Technically these are not mutually exclusive but I think you read it as the second one. I haven't really found much analysis about how public transit interfaces with self driving cars honestly.
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My wife is an ER doctor. I asked her and she said she talks to the radiologists all the time. I also recently had surgery and the surgeon talked to the radiologist to discuss my MRI before operating.
I'd clarify if her "all the time" means a couple of times a week. For 99.9% of cases an ER doctor would just read what the radiologist wrote in the document. It's sort of like saying "sometimes a cab driver talks to passengers and suggests a nice restaurant nearby, so you can't automate it away with a self-driving cab."
She also said that she frequently talks to the them before ordering scans to consult on what imaging she’s going to order.
> It's sort of like saying "sometimes a cab driver talks to passengers and suggests a nice restaurant nearby, so you can't automate it away with a self-driving cab."
It’s more like if 3/100 kids who took a robot taxi died, suffered injury, had to undergo unnecessary invasive testing, or were unnecessarily admitted to the hospital.
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I'm a diagnostic radiologist with 20 years clinical experience, and I have been programming computers since 1979. I need to challenge one of your core assumptions. > Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. I'm sorry, but I disagree, and I think you are making a wild assumption here. I am up to date on the latest AI products in radiology, use several of…
Your belief is held by many, many radiologists. One thing I like to highlight is that LLMs and LVMs are much more advanced than any model in the past. In particular, they do not require specific training data to contain a diagnosis. They don't even require specific modality data to make inferences. Think about how you learned anatomy. You probably looked at Netter drawings or Grey's long before you ever saw a CT or M…
I might quibble with your math a little. Most CTs have more than 100 images, in fact as you know stroke protocols have thousands. And many scans are reconstructed with different kernels, i.e. soft tissue, bone, lung. So maybe your number is a little low.
Still your point is a good one, that there is probably a finite number of imaging presentations possible. Let's pre-dictate them all! That's a lot of RVUs, where do I sign up ;-)
Now, consider this point. Two identical scans can have different "correct" interpretations.
How is that possible? To simplify things, consider an x-ray of a pediatric wrist. Is it fractured? Well, that depends. Where does it hurt? How old are they? What happened? What does the other wrist look like? Where did they grow up?
This may seems like an artificial example but I promise you it is not. There can be identical x-rays, and one is fractured and one is not.
So add this example to the training data set. Now do this for hundreds or thousands of other "corner cases". Does that head CT show acute blood, or is that just a small focus of gyriform dystrophic calcification? Etc.
I guess my point it, you may end up being right. But I don't think we are particularly close, and LLMs might not get us there.
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I'm a diagnostic radiologist with 20 years clinical experience, and I have been programming computers since 1979. I need to challenge one of your core assumptions. > Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. I'm sorry, but I disagree, and I think you are making a wild assumption here. I am up to date on the latest AI products in radiology, use several of…
> When I interpret a study I am not just matching patterns of pixels on the screen with my memory. Seems like an over simplification, but let's say it's just true. Wouldn't you rather spend your time on novel problems that you haven't seen before? Some ML system identifies easy/common ones that it has high confidence in, leaving the interesting ones for you?
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The FDA can clear whatever they want. A malpractice lawyer WILL sue and WILL win whenever an AI mistake slips through and no human was in the loop to fix the issue. It's the same way that we can save time and money if we just don't wash our hands when cooking food. Sure it's true. But someone WILL get sick and we WILL get in trouble for it
What's the difference in the lawsuit scenario if a doctor messes up? If the AI is the same or better error rate than a human, then insurance for it should be cheaper. If there's no regulatory blocks, then I don't see how it doesn't ultimately just become a cost comparison.
Scale. Doctors and taxi drivers represent several points of limited liability, whereas an AI would be treating (and thus liable for) all patients. If a hospital treats one hundred patients with ten doctors, and one doctor is negligent, then his patients might sue him; some patients seeing other doctors might sue the hospital if they see his hiring as indicative of broader institutional neglect, but they’d have to prove this in a lawsuit. If this happened with a software-based classifier being used at every major hospital, you’re talking about a class action lawsuit including every possible person who was ever misdiagnosed by the software; it’s a much more obvious candidate for a class action because the software company has more money and it was the same thing happening every time, whereas a doctor’s neglect or incompetence is not necessarily indicative of broader neglect or incompetence at an institutional level.
> If there's no regulatory blocks, then I don't see how it doesn't ultimately just become a cost comparison.
To make a fair comparison you’d have to look at how many more people are getting successful interventions due to the AI decreasing the cost of diagnosis.
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I'm a diagnostic radiologist with 20 years clinical experience, and I have been programming computers since 1979. I need to challenge one of your core assumptions. > Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. I'm sorry, but I disagree, and I think you are making a wild assumption here. I am up to date on the latest AI products in radiology, use several of…
AI can detect a Black person vs a White person via their chest x-rays. Radiologists say there is no difference. Turns out they're wrong. https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a... That being said, there are no radiologists available to hire at any price: https://x.com/ScottTruhlar/status/1951370887577706915
True, and very frustrating. Imaging volume is going parabolic and we cannot keep up! I am offering full partnership on day one with no buy-in for new hires. My group is in the top 1% of radiology income. I can't find anyone to hire, I can only steal people from other groups.
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…
I'm a diagnostic radiologist with 20 years clinical experience, and I have been programming computers since 1979. I need to challenge one of your core assumptions. > Can AI read diagnostic images better than a radiologist? Almost certainly the answer is (or will be) yes. I'm sorry, but I disagree, and I think you are making a wild assumption here. I am up to date on the latest AI products in radiology, use several of…
And in AI tech, even "5 years ago" is a different era.
In year 2025, we have those massive multimodal reasoning LLMs that can crossreference data from different images, text and more. If the kind of effort and expertise that went into general purpose GPT-5 went into a more specialized medical AI, where would its capabilities top out?
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Trucks are orders of magnitude more dangerous. I wouldn’t be surprised if Waymo is decades away from being able to operate a long haul truck on the open interstate.
Given that Aurora Innovation is running driverless semi-trucks on commercial routes between Dallas, Houston, and Texas as of right now , that would be surprising, yes, but for different reasons.