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

501–510 of 748 posts

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

#501

Post by haldujai »

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…

Radiologist who does read shoulder MRI would like to add that over half the annotations are wrong, glaring mistakes in anatomy and cardinal direction which begs the question of how is it making these findings without knowing what it’s looking at (here’s a hint, it’s hallucinated based on reports it sees).

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

#502

Post by anon84873628 »

resonious wrote: post #436
garciasn wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This lines up with my experience with my mother, though it played out differently. In her case, she would switch doctors every ~5-10 years and each time they'd basically say everything the previous doctor said was wrong. First it was "you have Lupus", second it was "actually it's some other autoimmune disease", then it was "actually whatever you had has been in remission for some time now and you've been taking brain…

I'm sorry to hear that. The accusations of drug seeking are particularly galling.

AI is absolutely a god send for patients navigating the medical system.

I know the US system is horrible and I sympathize with doctors doing their best within it. But we must admit, they are also responsible for the countless stories just like yours, and have contributed to the public's deteriorating trust of medical institutions. It's not just the insurance companies and conglomerate CEOs.

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

#503

Post by jrumbut »

IanCal wrote: post #368
Paracompact wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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."

Off topic but I have always felt this seemed like his misunderstanding rather than theirs. It’s an odd question, but it’s a very sensible point to make if Babbage has just told you this will solve the problem of mistakes in calculations - humans being involved at the start means human error still plagues the output.

> I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Well, he did diagnose the situation correctly. He couldn't comprehend the confusion of ideas that provoked the question.

I'm also not entirely sure it's an odd question to ask. To this day, users are surprised when their software produces garbage output instead of failing. Perhaps the members of parliament were expecting some form of input validation or sanity checking out output.

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

#504

Post by anon84873628 »

Eufrat wrote: post #440
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.

I feel like the promise of these models is to help people make more informed decisions. Improving the knowledge economy and general understanding. The problem is these are just statistical models at the end of the day, so you need to know something to be able to identify the errors. You can’t let them really be autonomous and you also can’t really have people turn into glorified approvers. If the machine is correct 8…

Why should we not expect a computer vision model to outperform humans on reading medical images?

The human experts are literally just a trained biological neural network. In this domain they are not capable of anything a computer can't already do.

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

#505

Post by mewpmewp2 »

nkrisc wrote: post #437
MattyMc wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo I don’t think that’s true. Avoiding this mistake requires knowing that an ultrasound may not detect calcification. For a patient reading their own report, I don’t think that’s intuitive. I would expect most people to read “no calcifications” and assume that their joint has no calcifications.

Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. My 8 year old understands this. After all, you can rarely ever prove something does not exist, only that it is unlikely to exist. If a report states that X was not found, it does not mean X did not exist, it means it was not found. What may be lost on the layperson is the nuance and understanding of how thorough or not…

But the problem was that the report is not saying "not found", it is saying "is not present" or "there is no X".

And I think we can easily have examples where we can reasonably trust this, and a spectrum of such.

E.g. there is a math solution and the report says "there is no errors in this solution", you would imagine that to be quite reliable, no?

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

#506

Post by anon84873628 »

prirun wrote: post #483
mring33621 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm sorry, but AIs only "know" about stuff that they have been trained on. If we would allow AIs to be trained on the petabytes of medical data hidden in hospital systems, they would most likely be much better at diagnosing illnesses and conditions than the average doctor. (Justifiable) Privacy around medical records so far prevents this. You think you're cheering for humans, but in fact you are gatekeeping healthcar…

I dunno... if we gave an AI all of these medical records as training data, wouldn't it be trained to give the same answers as the doctors already gave, without knowing whether those diagnoses were correct or not?

Except it would see all the times similar starting conditions led to different diagnosis and recognize those contradictions. Or all the different treatments and their outcomes. And it would never forget or have bias.

It would be like the sum of all medical professors in existence.

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

#507

Post by ashikns »

Aurornis wrote: post #208

> They injected me with Traumeel, which is registered in Germany as a homeopathic medicine "without a therapeutic indication". This single sentence provides a huge clue about what’s going on: This person’s medical team is not good. It’s not hard to get an LLM to perform better than a team that is injecting homeopathic botanical formulations and performing procedures that aren’t indicated for the condition. I think th…

I am confused why none of the experts weighing in here address this at all. Like I get that AI is generally disliked, but ignoring facts only makes me want to not trust doctors.

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

#508

Post by ashikns »

sxg wrote: post #236
simianwords wrote: post #41

Everyone talking about how doctors know better or have some context that is not shown here. But are you all forgetting that they literally injected a homeopathic drug on the author? Between that and Claude sometimes hallucinating, it’s probably worth encouraging patients to take second opinion always.

> But are you all forgetting that they literally injected a homeopathic drug on the author? I'm no fan of pseudoscience either, but this is where things get blurry. The placebo effect is real even if patients are aware of it. If you give a patient a homeopathic drug while informing them of potential side effects (if any), and then they feel better, have you hurt them? Or have you helped them? I personally have no int…

This is relying on the patient being stupid. I would always prefer just an honest explanation of things rather than pseudo-science drugs. And if I do discover that it's a pseudo-science drug then I've lost all confidence in that doctor. Doctors should stop pretending that they have access to some divine knowledge and everyone else is stupid.

And this interpretation is charitable, assuming that they wanted the patient to feel better via placebo. A different (and more likely) interpretation being they just wanted to charge for something extra.

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

#509

Post by sizzle »

scheme271 wrote: post #317
Esophagus4 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever let the LLMs “discuss” with each other to see if that would give better answers? You might end up with the answer from the most persuasive LLM, but you might also end up with better results. Wonder if there is a paper out there on this.

The problem is how do you know whether the answer is just the most persuasive or actually the most accurate one? It's hard to figure this out without domain knowledge.

Take the output to a Radiologist and verify the veracity of the statements.

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

#510

Post by masklinn »

randycupertino wrote: post #474
mettamage wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me what helped is taking 7.5 mg of mirtazapine. At higher levels it's an anti-depressant but at lower levels it's an anti-histamine. It gets me drowsy. Together with 0.3 mg melatonin it knocks me out. I only take it 3 times per week max to not have habituation kick in. So 3 days out of 7 days I have guaranteed good sleep. The other 4 days are a toss up. But an average of 5 days of good sleep is much better than 3…

Interesting. There recently was an article about how premenopausal and menopausal women are taking antihistamines with pepcid to help them sleep due to it going viral on tiktok. https://www.thecut.com/article/antihistamines-pepcid-ac-peri... > Then, a few months ago, Angela saw a social-media post from a woman who took daily anti-histamines (like Allegra, Claritin, or Zyrtec) plus Pepcid AC (a common antacid) for her…

Technically Pepcid is also an antihistamine, but h2. And h1-antihistamines have been used for sedation for a long time tho the effect is very much ymmv (first one I tried OTC would knock me out but not let me rest at all, not a keeper).
Post reply on HN