Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

antoine.fi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 748 posts

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

#441

Post by Georgelemental »

ambicapter wrote: post #227
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…

> 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…

> You would have to assume that every type of diagnosis instrument has infinite clarity and is always correct to be confused in this case.

There's a difference between 99.9% clarity and 50% clarity. Even if neither exactly equals 100%, it's understandable that a layperson would expect different language between them

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

#442

Post by trentor »

tiahura wrote: post #16
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…

Why isn’t diagnostic ultrasound used in orthopedics? They inspect fetus hearts and other organs everyday, why not shoulders? Seems much cheaper and faster.

Ultrasound was overlooked by US medicine as a first line imaging tool for a long time because it takes real skill and experience to do it right. But it's making a comeback. We've had Chinese, Indian, Australian, and American doctors visit us for one to two month stints to build up their skills.

Given the skill involved, it's probably a liability concern they don't want the exposure over there.

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

#443

Post by lazide »

brokencode wrote: post #410
lazide wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/its-remarkably-easy-...

Great, an article about Llama 2 from early 2025. That doesn’t at all invalidate what I said.

While completely ignoring the fundamental reason. Whoosh.

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

#445

Post by senectus1 »

jeswin wrote: post #31

I would not trust AI on images. But I once had ChatGPT tell me that an MRI report was very likely to be incorrect based on the text, and offered a different diagnosis. Since it was semi insisting, I visited another doctor who made me do a retest. Long story short, ChatGPT was correct. Again, this is just one single person's experience. So not worth much.

mate the other day chatGPT (enterprise) told me that the kernel 7.0.2 was older than 6.69

you cant trust these toys at all. that doesn't make the useless, just untrustworthy.

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

#446

Post by osmano807 »

garciasn wrote: post #413
rylando wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a rad tech, YOU TELL ‘EM DOC! I do like some uses of AI I’ve seen that help patients advocate for themselves or understand basic things like blood panel numbers, but it’s really bad at glazing people and leading them down medical rabbit holes kind of like the OP. You would think that the AI would point out that calcium is best demonstrated on Radiographs/CT imaging vs Ultrasound or something to that effect.

Semi-related: my father has complications from a motorcycle accident ~25y ago that crushed arteries in his leg coupled with diabetes (insulin / kept sugar at ~100 and his A1C was kept under 6.7 for ~15y). 6w ago had to have his toes removed due to dry gangrene; they eventually (2.5w ago) had to remove his leg below the knee because of the severe blood flow issues below the knee. Between the toes and the below the kne…

Probably liability... on the amputations I indicated and contraindicated, it's increasingly difficult to navigate trough patient perceptions while not disclosing so much as to give them rope to hang us. Some decisions are a game of probability that often we don't have clear numbers. In trauma, I have both cases where I recommended an amputation and at last minute decided to see that happened and the patient is walking with their leg today; and cases where I didn't recommend and later had to amputate as the lesion evolved. With cancer it's more straightforward, the cancer is what dictates the surgery... some cancers have poor response to other treatments, so we amputate. Some cancers had invaded the neurovascular bundle, so curative options involve necessarily amputation to get good margins. In cancer there's less doubt in the prognosis, so less chance of legal ramifications.

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

#447

Post by braiamp »

linsomniac wrote: post #314
braiamp wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, there's a lot to unpack here and you really had the deck stacked against you. First, lets go from the top, once a test says X, disproving that X is really hard. And that's not unique to the medical profession, it's inherent to all humans and we suck at revisiting or revising our decisions, much less at looking at the possibility to even reverse it. Which moves us to the next two issues: liability and time. Any mo…

>before they even have a case with you My problem is that I needed information from 2 ENT visits to feed into ChatGPT to get that study. On the first visit he scoped my sinuses and immediately said "I can see evidence of allergic reaction, see those white bumps?". On the second visit I got an allergy stick test and it came out negative. Those helped lead to that NIH study. It would have been very hard to have walked…

I mean, for the second (third?) option specifically. You will notice that they will be more open to go outside of the standard of care if you have a working theory.

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

#448

Post by dwd »

chpatrick wrote: post #264

I recently had a pretty bad injury and out of curiosity I asked Gemini what it thought based on some CT scan slice images (and no other information). Surprisingly it came to exactly the same diagnosis and treatment plan as my doctors, but the big advantage is that I could ask it follow up questions any time, whereas the doctors barely explained anything.

This...

Gemini will ask for the specific images it needs to see and show you examples of what each slice will look like.

But unlike the specialists who often come across as abrupt and rush you, Gemini will happily take you on a deep dive and continue to answer all you follow up questions indefinitely.

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

#449

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

aspenmartin wrote: post #414
operatingthetan wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying succinctly what I could not. If your consciousness and knowledge fundamentally does not change from your ongoing experience, then you are not learning. This is how the LLM currently functions.

You’re describing the problem of continual learning. As I said their “consciousness” for lack of a better term and knowledge does already change from ongoing experience in context which is another of saying for only a short window, today. They are ephemeral, sort of, but that’s a temporary limitation.

I think if your definition of consciousness can fit these things then you’re more open minded than I care to be. Consciousness isn’t really guessing the next thing to say- it’s hard to say what it is, obviously, but blindly feeling forwards with each new conversation doesn’t seem like consciousness or learning to me.

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

#450

Post by david-gpu »

wasabi991011 wrote: post #339
david-gpu wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last week I went to a highly-specialized tertiary clinic about further treatment for a rare medical condition that I was diagnosed and treated for as a child. The two very specialized doctors I met there confirmed a diagnostic mistake that a specialist had made ten years ago. The only reason I pursued a second opinion, ten years later, was because Google Gemini had explained to me that the specialist ten years ago ha…

Can you elaborate on how you use Gemini to diagnose long term health issues? Considering doing the same for myself, but I have no idea what is too much vs too little information, and generally the type of prompt engineering to do.

Some folks are not going to like what I am about to say, but what I do is write down as much information that I think may be relevant as possible, trying to avoid leading the witness with any of my preconceived ideas of what may be going on. At the end, I encourage them to ask me questions to get a more complete picture of what may be going on.

After a couple of rounds of that, a picture will start to emerge. The AI will make a few XYZ hypotheses of what may be going on, some of which will make more sense to you than others. This is when you can start searching some of those terms in places like pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, including for example like diagnostic criteria for XYZ.

One of the ways I often use these AIs, not just in the context of finding possible diagnoses, is requesting them to make the case for and against hypothesis XYZ based on the data you have personally collected. Again, it's not about fully buying every thing that comes out of them, but it can help you consider angles or possibilities that did not occur to you, or that you had previously accepted/discarded without sufficient evidence. Think of them as that quirky acquaintance that knows a little bit about everything but sometimes misremembers, rather than as a god-like oracle.

And don't do all this in a single session/context. Start a new context every now and then, because otherwise it tends to go in circles as these AIs are biased towards agreeing with whatever it is you said most recently. Intentionally challenge yourself, re-evaluate the existing data from other perspectives.

Sometimes what you learn is not pleasant, but as more data becomes available, you learn to accept it. Good luck.

Post reply on HN