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

antoine.fi

381–390 of 748 posts

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

#381

> 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…

To provide a competing point of anecdata: A Gemini diagnosis saved me $3,000 in unnecessary repairs on my Civic.

[deleted]

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So an ultrasound report can state there are no calcifications while a plain radiograph can report the presence of calcifications without being inconsistent. Obviously very confusing to patients and people unfamiliar with medical jargon This is being overly nice, I think. Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo. You would have to assume that every type of diagnosis instrument has infinite clarity and is a…

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

To quote the LLM-ism, they were making a sharp point. It doesn't matter how precise the calculations are if you're calculating the wrong thing.

I suspect their sarcasm might have escaped Babbage who seems to have been on what we now call "the spectrum."

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

#383
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying that medicine is inherently fallible and therefore AI is more likely to make a good diagnosis - particularly a cluster of specialist AIs?

Yeah I think the OP is muddling the point by conflating "physician's version of the diagnosis" with "The Diagnosis". There is absolutely one "The Diagnosis". Human body is a machine, albeit a very complex one, and all measurement sources have noise. But they are all measuring one reality, and if there is a problem, there should be one explanation that all measurements align with. They can be noisy but can never be co…

I think „the diagnosis” is over simplification and lots of professionals would disagree that there’s always a single one. As a patient your goal is to eliminate the symptoms of whatever is going on in your system. Often times there could be many reasons for it and only curing one can help you already. The diagnosis is a help tool to choose the roght curation method.

Thus, chasing the „right” diagnosis (whatever that is?) is pointless, as it only the outcome (reducing symptoms, stopping the damage) can tell you if the diagnosis was right, but not the only one right.

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

#384
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cough Immunology

I mean, probably not. No expert, but everytime I go to an immunology meeting (I'm a paediatrician) they've got a whole stack of new diseases. The field is moving fast, and there has to be a careful amount of shared decision making about when to test, what a positive test means and so on. I reckon they're as safe as any of us.

yeah, you said "one that is more immune"

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think the OP is muddling the point by conflating "physician's version of the diagnosis" with "The Diagnosis". There is absolutely one "The Diagnosis". Human body is a machine, albeit a very complex one, and all measurement sources have noise. But they are all measuring one reality, and if there is a problem, there should be one explanation that all measurements align with. They can be noisy but can never be co…

I think „the diagnosis” is over simplification and lots of professionals would disagree that there’s always a single one. As a patient your goal is to eliminate the symptoms of whatever is going on in your system. Often times there could be many reasons for it and only curing one can help you already. The diagnosis is a help tool to choose the roght curation method. Thus, chasing the „right” diagnosis (whatever that…

> I think „the diagnosis” is over simplification and lots of professionals would disagree that there’s always a single one.

"The Diagnosis" does not mean "one root cause".

Situation: my car has some unexplained vibrations. 1. Mechanic A says that it is the engine mounts 2. Mechanic B says that it is some weirdness in how the exhaust assembly is hanging to the underbody 3. Mechanic C says that it is just my wife farting

I replace engine mounts and 40% of the problem is reduced. I then drive without my wife and the remaining 60% is solved.

"The Diagnosis" was: 40% mounts, 60% wife, 0% exhaust.

There is always one "The Diagnosis".

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

#386

I've seen a lot of friends and family members almost immediately get offered surgery for shoulder pain. It's just often the default for people that do surgeries for a living. I also had a pretty painful shoulder issue at one point, where the pain just wasn't subsiding for months. I tried massages and acupuncture as I didn't want to do surgery, but it wasn't helping at all. The thing that fixed it for me was just real…

I had issues with my shoulder for years. Tried PT as well as pull/push-ups but doing that made the pain worse (if I wasn't doing any exercises involving the shoulder it was "fine")…

same here. I started doing yoga and rock climbing, and it stretched everything out, and strengthened all the muscles around it. I rarely have an issue now.

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

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how this is a different result than giving any LLM a task that is not completely grounded? I’ve observed this in coding tasks, if I forget to include a file referred to in the spec, the LLM will just hallucinate a version of it and my results suck. If I give it the file (and really, all the information I claimed it had access to), the task works fine. I fixed this in my pipeline with a prompt that…

It's not different- there's a line of research and reasoning where people who don't use LLM's regularly point out issues that have been known (and more or less solved) for more than a year now (which is an eternity in the LLM space).

Ya, that’s what I guessed. I assume everyone who uses LLMs discovers this on their own eventually if they aren’t made aware of it before it happens.

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

#388
As everyone knows here a large language model using probabilistic next phrase approach will not be able to "diagnose" results from an MRI - at least not with enough confidence. It lacks the patient's history and a snapshot along with very varying datapoints in the training set will lead to "approximate" results. Not what a true doctor with a 360 view of a particular patient's health would be able to diagnose. That 'approximation' will get "better" in time - which only means the results will be replaced by yet another approximation.

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

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qualit…

There's a post every other month where some dude who put nonsense information online celebrates because it actually ended up in some frontier models weights. If it's easy enough that some randos can do it for fun, what do you think happens when there's commercial interest behind it? Obviously companies are going try nudging AI towards recommending whatever they're selling. It's a logical extension of SEO - and that's…

There are so many better data sources that AI labs can use here that this argument really holds no water at all.

Peer reviewed journals, textbooks, in-house teams of experts, trusted news publications, etc.

The whole idea of scraping large swaths of the internet for training data has always been pretty dubious due to the variable data quality.

I mean, just look at the early Google models that told people to put glue in their pizza due to a joke in the training set. Garbage in, garbage out.

This is one of the first and most obvious problems all of these labs have run into, and countermeasures are only going to improve.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a post every other month where some dude who put nonsense information online celebrates because it actually ended up in some frontier models weights. If it's easy enough that some randos can do it for fun, what do you think happens when there's commercial interest behind it? Obviously companies are going try nudging AI towards recommending whatever they're selling. It's a logical extension of SEO - and that's…

There are so many better data sources that AI labs can use here that this argument really holds no water at all. Peer reviewed journals, textbooks, in-house teams of experts, trusted news publications, etc. The whole idea of scraping large swaths of the internet for training data has always been pretty dubious due to the variable data quality. I mean, just look at the early Google models that told people to put glue…

But they don’t, generally. Which is why it is a great argument, because it’s easy to falsify - and see it is what is actually happening.

Also, those other sources are getting buried in AI slop too.

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