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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

#161

Post by sxg »

frereubu wrote: post #135
sxg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's an extreme edge case, which I don't think is in the context of the concerns in this thread.

The specific case doesn't matter--it's meant to make you think about the general question throughout this thread: when an expert isn't available, should non-experts use AI (or other tools) to help themselves? Sometimes the answer is yes because the potential benefits outweigh the potential harms (if any harms exist). But sometimes the answer is no because misleading/incorrect advice can cause a net harm.

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

#162

Post by brokencode »

lazide wrote: post #107
appplication wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the root of AI psychosis. There’s a lot of unpack here, and I won’t go too deep because you can’t really have a discussion with affected folks because their fundamental basis is not evidence, it’s belief. It is weirdly religious in a way, because if you were to present contrary evidence (e.g. experts in a field weighing in about how plausible sounding responses are bunk), you would only be told you don’t beli…

I don’t think they will improve, there is too much incentive to poison the datasets going forward. A lot of the models up to this point have been benefitted - like Google did - from essentially ‘pre SEO’ internet. Now the same tools are being used to generate nigh infinite good sounding bullshit, which poisons the dataset in all sorts of hard to detect ways. To add insult to injury, the human experts are also not as.…

I seriously doubt that data set poisoning will be a real limiter in model performance.

For one, if your website/book is poisoned, who is going to trust it for anything at all, much less for training models?

For two, all the major AI labs hire or contract for subject matter experts to create curated data sets, evaluate model performance, etc.

Unless they hire malicious experts, this will provide a growing, high quality data set that should drown out any poisoned pretraining data.

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

#163

Post by lutusp »

> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. You don't have to worry anymore and can let them guide you through the process.

> AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way ...

I see this as a field report in a time of fundamental transition, from a world without AI, to one that accommodates/incorporates AI. For this to happen, AI will need to become more trustworthy. As for the U.S. medical system, it can't get much worse.

I recently had a similar experience (meaning walking a fence between old and new methods), where I was told I could get an appointment with a human medical practitioner in nine months. So, to resolve my anxiety I consulted AI and got an instant diagnosis, one that was later confirmed by the inaccessible medics.

Being a born skeptic I wasn't going to act on AI's diagnosis, I just wanted to know what was going on, resolve some uncertainty. Another advantage: an AI chatbot doesn't say, "Wait, you're on Medicare? Hmm. See you in nine months."

Don't take this as an endorsement of AI's diagnostic abilities -- it's way too soon for that. In my case it was a slam dunk, about a condition I knew nothing about.

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

#164

Post by brokencode »

something98 wrote: post #154
rvnx wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human doctors use LLMs to diagnose too OpenEvidence claims "More than 40% of U.S. physicians use it daily, and it handled around 20 million clinical consultations per month. Over 100 million Americans were treated by a doctor using it in 2025." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/openevidence-chatgpt-for-doc...

This is a very misleading statement; most of those physicians are using LLMs to transcribe notes from visits and/or for billing purposes (e.g., proper billing codes).

OpenEvidence is specifically meant to help clinicians make evidence-based decisions in the diagnosis and treatment of patients, not note transcription.

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

#165

Post by lostlogin »

maxall4 wrote: post #3
Aeolun wrote: post #2

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

Especially an MRI which is a 3D medium —something current LLMs are very bad at.

> MRI which is a 3D medium

The finer detail (which you may already know) is more complicated.

MR does ‘2D’ scans which are a slice, then a gap of non-imaged tissue (typically 10% the slice thickness) then a slice. Each slice is an image with a number of pixels, say 320. Each pixel in the slice is small, eg 0.5mm but very thick due to the slice being thick, which is required for MRI signal. The pixels are 3mm in the shoulder scan done here.

‘3D’ scans don’t have a gap between slices, and are often isotopic, meaning the same resolution in all directions. The voxel (a pixel with depth) would be something like 1mm x 1mm x 1mm.

3D scans are slow, prone to movement artifact and never as pretty in plane as a good 2D. You can reformat them to look ok in any plane.

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

#166

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #117

> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. [...] AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way [...] but I don't know if I can fully trust AI either. This really is key. We know we can't trust the AI, but at the same time we're also more comfortable asking the AI for clarifications or confronting it. Not having a time-bound appointment or paying by the ho…

The soothing sound of ChatGPT telling us how right and clever we are…how could it possibly hallucinate, certainly not 5.5

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

#167

Post by Aurornis »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #117

> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. [...] AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way [...] but I don't know if I can fully trust AI either. This really is key. We know we can't trust the AI, but at the same time we're also more comfortable asking the AI for clarifications or confronting it. Not having a time-bound appointment or paying by the ho…

I have multiple LLM subscriptions at any given time, plus an array of local models.

When I ask a question outside of my domain of expertise I like to ask all of the LLMs I have access to. I also create separate sessions and ask the same question multiple ways.

It’s revealing to see how many different and contradictory answers I get, most of which are presented confidently.

The last time I ran a medical question through Claude I couldn’t even get consistent answers between sessions.

It’s also scary how easily you can lead each LLM to the answer you have in mind. When I would start asking questions about different options that other LLMs had presented, each session would drift toward that explanation.

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

#168

Post by dwa3592 »

Was it 2016 when Geoff hinton said that radiology was a dead career?

Well, we now have the best model of our time (trillions of $$$ of investments) telling us something completely different(and wrong) from a human expert. I would really like someone calling out dario, sam, elon on these things and hear their explanations but alas, a man can only dream.

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

#169

Post by raincole »

ricardobayes wrote: post #7

That might be doctors new nightmare: people who second guess everything with AI. Previously it was "google your symptoms".

People should've googled their symptoms and especially the prescriptions they got. It has always been a good practice. If[0] AI proves to be the new google then people should ask AI too.

[0]: IF.

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

#170

Post by sarchertech »

rvnx wrote: post #130
lazide wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they will improve, there is too much incentive to poison the datasets going forward. A lot of the models up to this point have been benefitted - like Google did - from essentially ‘pre SEO’ internet. Now the same tools are being used to generate nigh infinite good sounding bullshit, which poisons the dataset in all sorts of hard to detect ways. To add insult to injury, the human experts are also not as.…

Human doctors use LLMs to diagnose too OpenEvidence claims "More than 40% of U.S. physicians use it daily, and it handled around 20 million clinical consultations per month. Over 100 million Americans were treated by a doctor using it in 2025." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/openevidence-chatgpt-for-doc...

Ignoring the fact that this number comes from a company press release, it doesn’t say anything about the number of doctors using it to diagnose, just that they use it.

If a physician uses Google to search for a dosage chart for some drug they rarely prescribe, you wouldn’t say they are using Google to diagnose the patient. You wouldn’t say that either if they used Google to search for the most recent studies on a topic.

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