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

antoine.fi

191–200 of 748 posts

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

#191

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 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 what the AI is being asked to do is it likely you will find the output helpful.

I always recommend people try asking LLMs a lot of questions on something they know first. Programmers should start by asking LLMs to work on a codebase they’re familiar with first.

You’re overstating the problem, though. Even for an expert the LLM will get a lot of things right and can be helpful under a watchful eye.

The real problem is knowing how to identify when it’s on the right track and when you need to correct it, because both cases are presented with the same tone and confidence.

An expert can better identify when the LLM output doesn’t sound plausible. Someone unfamiliar with the topic will think everything it says looks correct.

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

#192

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.

It’s an odd field, obviously it’s in high demand for diagnostics and anytime you have to do an xray, MRI, etc you have to wait hours for one to become available.

I think they’re artificially stunting the field to raise their wages. For example in my city the medical school only accepts 11 people into the program a year. (With an average graduation rate or 3-5). My niece has been trying for 2 years and finally got in this last year. Even radiology is doing AI assisted diagnostics. Half my MRI’s from this year has Doctor notes and HealthBot (AI) notes attached to them.

~ I’m assuming other schools severely limit their radiology admissions as well. To keep the wages high and the field desirable.

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

#193

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…

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…

>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. Treating it as if it is an intelligence is the problem.

The problem is that AI psychosis is fundamentally the belief that an LLM is "thinking" at all. Outputs are just believable word vomit which resembles factual information.

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

#194

As a radiologist I have found Claude and ChatGPT to be absolutely terrible at MRI and I would not trust it one bit. It has its merits if you need to research stuff that is more text based, but radiological images is just something that they cannot interpret good enough (yet)

AI makes up for its poor reporting by enhancing the images. Current Siemens MR software ‘Deep Resolve’ makes up the signal (adding about 50%), then makes up every second pixel, and then, for 3D sequences, makes up every second slice. It’s locking about 59% of the time off each sequences. And it’s really really good. I’m an MR tech.

Sorry? You use AI to hallucinate medical images and that's good?

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

#195

> 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 solution to uncertain information isn't more information, which the AI can certainly provide, it's better information, and AI cannot currently provide that. I'd argue that AI _can_ currently provide that, but that it can't do it _reliably_, and that to non-experts it's impossible to differentiate, which makes it all the more dangerous.

Isn't that the case with human "experts"? If you had encounters with doctors, mechanics, etc. you'll know you can get a completely different diagnosis for the same problem which obviously means (in most cases) that the person you thought an expert is wrong.

What is needed are studies that will take a cold look at the actual results because AI seems to be required to be perfect or it is useless. It just needs to be as good as a human for most stuff, but in the long run it will be much better. At least that what extrapolating current reality shows us.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not anytime someone is an actual expert at anything, AI output appears insufficient. That is why experts in various fields use AI. Then to say "Aha, but all of that is AI psychosis" makes obviously no sense: Why would we trust experts when they offer critique but not when they say "this is helpful"? Overall: People are not insane. AI makes mistakes and, often, fails completely. AI also helps them do things better…

How many times have you seen an expert go "yeah these results are good consistently enough for a non expert to trust them without expert assistance"? There is a huge difference between having a chance of a good result, which can be useful for experts able to filter out the bullshit, and consistent success. I would generate code as a helper, I would never allow a guy from marketing to merge unreviewed AI code.

I had a realization recently that the problem with "AI isn't consistently good enough" is that experience is probably not sufficiently distinguishable from the experience most non-experts have with computer systems all the time.

As an industry we've been promising people for decades that if they put all their data into our special softwares they can get all sorts of information back out that will make life easier for them, reveal new insights and otherwise improve their understanding. But the unspoken caveat has always been that you have to put the right data into the right places, in the right format, in the right way and then you have to ask the right questions, in the right syntax, with the right tools. And if you get any one of those parts wrong, you're not going to get the right answers (or possibly even any answer at all). How many people have had their excel worksheet that they (or someone else they asked/employed) built for some task that has been working fine for the last year suddenly stop working or start throwing out nonsense numbers because some input changed? Or how many people have experienced their system seemingly throw out meaningless garbage because daylight savings changed right at the moment the report was being run? Or spent months operating on wrong data because the person who wrote the query misplaced a parenthesis and the query was searching for "(foo AND bar) OR baz" and not "foo AND (bar OR baz)". For most people, the computer and the programs they use to do their jobs are magical black boxes that most of the time produce mostly the right answers and sometimes get things very very wrong with no indication of what has changed. Which is effectively the same experience they will have with an AI, but now instead of needing to figure out some arcane excel pivot table and VBA script, they can just dump some raw data and a "natural language" question into the AI.

And that's not counting the fact that their experience with looking information up online is about the same as well. How many absolutely confident wrong takes have you encountered online for things you're an expert in? How many of those wrong takes have come straight from supposedly trustworthy sources like news companies or even other people in the field?

For most people, using a computer has always come with the asterisk that you should always be aware that the source you're reading could be very wrong, that the output is only correct assuming all the inputs and all the parts processing that input are also correct and that everything you do should be accompanied by vetting by experts, whether those experts were software developers or domain experts. For most people the only thing that's changed with AI is that it's a one stop shop for their "probably directionally right, almost certainly wrong in the details" access to the digital oracles.

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

#197
post #90

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

It’s funny every profession deals with customers making their own guesses at diagnosis. I told my mechanic the film flam is broken but he said it was the rim ram. He fixed it and we all went in with our lives. But doctors insist on this God like status so it’s a “nightmare” when patients try to help themselves.

you are literally taking sleeping pills ..

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a fair assessment of what AI is doing. Studies have found that newer reasoning AIs are about as good at diagnosing illness from a written description of symptoms as doctors are. Granted, it cannot actually examine a patient, so we're not replacing doctors anytime soon. But your view is obsolete. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433

[flagged]

But I, SCP-426, am a toaster.

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

#199

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…

AI is an expert in everything you are not.

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

#200
I use LLMs every day and value the benefits they offer, but this approach seems misguided. A smarter way to use them would be to consult the LLM before seeing the specialist and ask it to bring you up to speed on capabilities/limitations and develop a list of important questions to ask.
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