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I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

antoine.fi

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Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#71

Post by nostrebored »

kierangill wrote: post #51
TSiege wrote: post #9

Always worth a share for this scenario. It's not clear if LLMs are capable of doing actual analysis on medical imaging. For details see this article https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/frontier-models... > As detailed in a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, a team of researchers at Stanford University found that frontier AI models readily generated “detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces…

I work at a telemedicine company. We’ve benchmarked a few frontier LLMs on public medical imaging datasets. One test included high-quality and high-consensus otoscopic images. We didn’t anticipate the models to do well on something so niche, but what concerned us was how poorly calibrated the models were. I know you can’t trust an LLM’s self-assessed “confidence” of a prediction, but I’ve found that confidence can at…

But the binary classification models can be made ternary easily. RL on congruence plus penalty for misdiagnosis is easy to set up and gives great results.

What I’ve seen be the true bottleneck is people not setting up the structured data. But making a tiny reasoning model with OPSD -> GRPO is totally doable with a bit of money.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#72

Post by EA-3167 »

whatever1 wrote: post #49
nlawalker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one else seems to find this to be quite damning for the AI services being offered, preferring instanced to be wowed by the convenience and speed at which they can be delivered unreviewed and unproven information "Be wowed by the convenience and speed", or merely "take advantage of the mere availability"? What most people find to be damning about expert advice is that they simply can't get it anywhere, at any cos…

So if you want to do a surgery but you don’t see any surgeons around you ask a grocery butcher to have his way?

People, especially in medical crises, are desperate for answers that they often can't get because their clinicians don't know. The illusion of an all-knowing guru who sounds like their doctor and tells them ANYTHING is extremely alluring. If you're waiting to hear back from a doctor about test results (which these days probably showed up on your online account the moment they were completed) can be agonizing.

Ok for pain in your shoulder it might not, but how about a woman with a lump in her breast waiting for the mammogram interpretation? How about someone trying to understand disturbing lab results? People are also often pushed these days to move through visits with doctors at a breakneck speed, but the AI will "hear you out" all day.

Part of this is a problem with the AI, part of it a problem with our healthcare systems, and part of it is simply human nature. If you think that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the rest weren't aware of this going in you must have very little faith in the intelligence of their members. It's not hard to imagine the future of LLM's should involve a hell of a lot of liability on the companies running it, but for now it's the Wild West.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#73

Post by ohyes »

sxg wrote: post #58
rafterydj wrote: post #15

I feel like I'm going nuts. There are other commenters saying this is a good practice they've also done for other injuries. You are saying you are an actual radiologist and immediately clock the problems with its advice. I have seen this pattern over and over again. Anytime someone is an actual expert at anything, AI output appears insufficient or incomplete or outright misleading. It is only when you do not know wha…

I see your argument, but it's not exactly news that an expert found a flaw in a popular tool. You could say the same about Wikipedia--experts have tons of issues with it, but Wikipedia still provides value to non-experts. The most likely alternative to Wikipedia for non-experts is simply not trying to learn anything new. Similarly with LLMs, you can't just write them off entirely because they sometimes provide mislea…

The free alternative to Wikipedia is the library, not “don’t learn anything new ever”.

I find Claude is surprisingly similar to a confident but incorrect coworker, with the benefit that Claude will reevaluate when I correct it.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#74

Post by lucfranken »

Why wouldn’t you as a doctor by standard run the images through a certified compliant LLM? The actual cost won’t be it and then you can see if you get any new ideas from it. See if it’s just wrong or that it spotted a little detail you missed?

The LLM doesn’t need to be leading or whatever but then you can have a conversation with the patient. If their ChatGPT reports has differences it can be analyzed as well.

It feels like the time constraint of the 15m doctor sessions is the thing. But if prepared immediately after the scan then why not?

There is always time needed to factor in new developments and innovations and that’s fine. Just moving blindly work from human to LLM is wrong. But learning on and testing with all the ai tools incoming constantly won’t be a waste. There will be more and more tools in those processes outside of human judgement, better improve the workflows now to be able to test and plugin new models and systems when they are ready.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#75

Post by foobarian »

sxg wrote: post #6

I'm a radiologist but can't really weigh in without seeing the full 3D MRI dataset. Regarding this point: > They performed shockwave therapy on my shoulder even though a recent clinical practice guideline says clinicians should not use or recommend shockwave therapy for rotator-cuff tendinopathy without calcification; I was told during ultrasound that there was no calcification. Ultrasound isn't a great way to assess…

Huh, I'm reading and looking up these words you guys are saying and it is starting to look exactly like the symptoms I have been having with my own right shoulder! I feel like a giant gaping rabbit hole just opened up next to my desk.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#76

Post by nostrebored »

behnamoh wrote: post #18
Aeolun wrote: post #2

I would not use Claude to get a second opinion on anything that’s an image.

What's wrong with Claude? I've asked it to analyze images and even Opus 4 would perfect nail it.

Claude is the worst FM at image understanding. Prior to gpt-5.4 the only usable models were Gemini and Qwen.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#77

Post by mootothemax »

Can any LLM give you the rough pixel coordinates of an item it identifies in an image?

I found that while Claude, GPT etc could describe an image, there was no way to link the description back to specific pixels in the image itself. Not even to a bounding box or segment.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#78

Post by beering »

rafterydj wrote: post #15

I feel like I'm going nuts. There are other commenters saying this is a good practice they've also done for other injuries. You are saying you are an actual radiologist and immediately clock the problems with its advice. I have seen this pattern over and over again. Anytime someone is an actual expert at anything, AI output appears insufficient or incomplete or outright misleading. It is only when you do not know wha…

TFA doesn’t actually state where the bit about shockwave therapy came from and it wasn’t the main point of the article. The concern was about being given useless therapies. The homeopathic analgesic is concerning, at least to me.

I.e. nothing this radiologist said was related to the LLM’s advice.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#79

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

sxg wrote: post #61
whatever1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you want to do a surgery but you don’t see any surgeons around you ask a grocery butcher to have his way?

In certain circumstances, the answer is yes. If an airplane's pilots are incapacitated, do you simply give up and crash the plane because there are no other pilots on board? Or would you rather have someone on the ground try to coach a passenger into at least attempting to land the plane?

As long as that passenger didn’t have the fish.

Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

#80

Post by foobarian »

lucfranken wrote: post #74

Why wouldn’t you as a doctor by standard run the images through a certified compliant LLM? The actual cost won’t be it and then you can see if you get any new ideas from it. See if it’s just wrong or that it spotted a little detail you missed? The LLM doesn’t need to be leading or whatever but then you can have a conversation with the patient. If their ChatGPT reports has differences it can be analyzed as well. It fe…

I've been starting to think of LLM as a great tool for "lead generation," borrowing a term from sales. Most of the things it comes up with don't pan out, but in many cases it's things we wouldn't have thought of, or at least not as quickly. This is especially in the context of web service or SAAS outages.
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