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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

#461
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.

Yes and I would swear that 1700 of those 2000 must be in Westwood (near UCLA in Los Angeles). I was stopped for a couple minutes waiting for a friend to come out and I counted 7 Waymos driving past me in 60 seconds. Truth be told they seemed to be driving better than the meatbags around them.

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

#462
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption is that more productive AI + humans leads to cost reductions. But if everyone involved has a profit motive, you end up cutting at those cost reductions. "We'll save you 100 bucks, so give us 50", done at the AI model level, the AI model repackager, the software suite that the hospital is using, the system integrators that manage the software suite installation for the hospital, the reseller of the inte…

Nobody has a profit motive since doctors get their bills paid per procedure and health insurers have a profit cap.

Wait, explain. The insurer thing, I get: they're capped. The doctors seem definitely to have a profit motive!

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

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking off on their own is one thing. Being able to properly handle a high-speed abort is another, given that is one of the most dangerous emergency procedures in aviation.

Agreed. I had to actually reject a takeoff in a C172 on a somewhat short runway and that was already enough stress.

Having flown military jets . . . I'm thankful I only ever had to high-speed abort in the simulator. It's sporty, even with a tailhook and long-field arresting gear. The nightmare scenario was a dual high-speed abort during a formation takeoff. First one to the arresting gear loses, and has to pass it up for the one behind.

There's no other regime of flight where you're asking the aircraft to go from "I want to do this" to "I want to do the exact opposite of that" in a matter of seconds, and the physics is not in your favor.

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

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re calculating, but this math seems wildly off. Sincerely don’t understand an alternate numerical point being made.

> Given a 16-bit, 512 x 512 x 100 slice CT scan, you're looking at 2^16 * 26214400

65536^(512*512) or 65536 multiplied by itself 262144 times for each image. An enormous number. Whether or not assume replacement (duplicates) is moot.

> That's 100 * 26214400 = 262,440,000

There are 100^(512*512) 512x512 100-level grayscale images alone or 100 to the 262144 power - 100 multiplied 262144 times. Again how you paring down a massive combinatoric space to a reasonable 262 mil?

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

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's horrific. You pay insurance to have ChatGPT make the diagnosis. But you still need to pay out of pocket anyway. Because of that, I am 100% confident this will become reality. It is too good to pass up.

People will flock to "AI medical" insurance that costs $50/mo and lets you see whatever AI specialist you want whenever you want.

Think a problem here is the sycophantic nature. If I’m a hypochondriac, and I have some new onset symptoms, and I prompt some LLM about what I’m feeling and what I suspect, I worry it’ll likely positively reinforce a diagnosis I’m seeking.

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

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least one train has crashed with fatalities due to hitting a cow.

Can you provide a reference? That's difficult to believe. Was this a diesel locomotive pulling a freight train or was it something smaller/lighter?

Not your correspondent, but trains are quite easy to derail, because they work by sliding orthogonality over the rail, and because otherwise there are way worse crashes.

The cow might not have caused the fatalities directly, but derailment, and a fast train crashing unbound through the landscape has a lot of kinetic energy.

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has a profit motive since doctors get their bills paid per procedure and health insurers have a profit cap.

Wait, explain. The insurer thing, I get: they're capped. The doctors seem definitely to have a profit motive!

I think the idea there is that generally speaking doctors get rebated on some sort of defined cost schedule. They'll get $40 from the insurance company for some basic kind of visit, and that is "fixed"...

I don't live in the US and when I did wasn't paying doctors very often... but my impression was that even if the rebate schedule is fixed they could "just" ask for more/less, and the rebate schedule is defined by the insurance company (so the insurance company can increase their costs through this schedule, leading to ways to make profit elsewhere!)

I could be totally offbase, I've always thought the Obamacare profit percentage cap to be a fake constraint.

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

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has a profit motive since doctors get their bills paid per procedure and health insurers have a profit cap.

Wait, explain. The insurer thing, I get: they're capped. The doctors seem definitely to have a profit motive!

The doctor doesn’t have a motive to replace himself with an AI? That’s what I meant.

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

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my pcp doesn’t even have the tools to view an mri even though part of a hospital system.

That’s an issue with that practice. I had the tools to view MRIs in my laptop.

that’s heartening. do you believe the average pcp is competent to review an mri and act on it given the specialist’s report?

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

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an issue with that practice. I had the tools to view MRIs in my laptop.

that’s heartening. do you believe the average pcp is competent to review an mri and act on it given the specialist’s report?

also note the hospital system is extremely paranoid about data management and probably wouldn’t allow a pcp to have mri data on a laptop. even specialists seem to only review mri on hospital desktops.
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