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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

#671

Post by engeljohnb »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #668
engeljohnb wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A second opinion is a smart move if one has doubts about their diagnosis. Doctors make mistakes, and even though I've worked with countless great doctors, I've never worked a job where there wasn't at least one who was undiscerning, or downright lazy and negligent. It's hard to tell people to trust their doctor when I know there are plenty of doctors out there like this. But AI as of right now is worse than any bad d…

The healthcare affordability crisis is only going to exacerbate the trend of using AI as a replacement for a real doctor. I went to urgent care a few months ago to get tested for COVID and two other flu strains and it came out to almost $500. Anecdotally, several people in my life who embrace less traditional (and sometimes more conspiratorial) views on modern healthcare tend to be the ones that can't afford it. A co…

That's the balance I'm finding it very hard to strike when talking to my family about doctors.

Everyone is either a "all doctors are scams" QAnon type, or they blindly trust everything their doctor says, no matter how fishy, in fear of coming off as one of the former group.

And, to use a phrase we all hate by now, you're absolutely right. When most people have to go into debt to even see a doctor, what can people possibly conclude from that besides "all doctors are out to scam you?"

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

#672

Post by rockostrich »

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…

There are 3 kinds of mechanics:

Scammers who do the lowest effort diagnostic and "fix" to get you to pay a smaller amount of money to fix the problem in the short term even though it'll re-present itself a week/month/year later.

Upsellers who will find other things "wrong" with your car and pressure you into paying to fix them because they sound a lot worse than they are.

Good mechanics that will explain what they did to diagnose the issue and recommend different options depending on what the issue is.

Funnily enough, I've found that doctors tend to also fit into these 3 archetypes.

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

#673

Post by coderatlarge »

bondarchuk wrote: post #641
marcus_holmes wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my day job we tried creating a credit assessor tool using LLM as the credit assessor. It did great, generated a report on the assessed business that was incredibly detailed and plausible. Then I started running tests and getting into the details, and found that if you ran the same report on the same data, it generated completely different, still very plausible, results. I could run the same source data through the…

It's funny that if the LLMs had all given the same result each time (it sounds like) you would have considered it more valid, even though it might just be giving a single wrong answer more consistently.

surely getting the same answer multiple ways suggests it is nore likely in the probability space?

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

#674

Post by zoul »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #620
themantalope wrote: post #492

Radiologist. I don’t read MR shoulder exams in my day to day practice, but from the few pictures shown , I can’t conclusively disagree with the original report. These models are generally terrible at reading medical images. The amount of public training data on the internet compared to the number of scans a radiologist reads in training is minuscule. There’s obviously a ton of medical images in general but very few,…

No trolling here: Do you feel threatened by the advance of AI/LLMs with respect to your field? I would. I am a computer programmer, and it absolutely feels threatening.

As a programmer, I don’t feel threatened by the technology itself, but I do feel threatened by the second-degree effects such as what the technology does to our field, especially in the wrong hands.

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

#675

Post by johnwalkr »

KingMob wrote: post #532
charles_f wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It funny to see the community here expects the human body to be treated like a deterministic function In a community largely made of people whose job it is to produce such functions, I'd say it's to be expected

It's funny (and a little depressing), because HN routinely assumes that their world view, and thus, their domain expertise, transfers. There's no shortage of tech people convinced they deeply understand law, medicine, philosophy, etc. despite never having read much on the topics.

Most of my "favorited" comments on here are by software people with confident yet incorrect statements (usually by way of vastly underestimating complexity) about one of my domains of expertise.

I can't find it but one of the greatest show HN was a blog post about someone who was annoyed by his inconsistent shower temperature control. From memory, he spent a full weekend adjusting it, taking measurements, making graphs, and proposed "next steps" about prototyping better temperature control with microcontrollers and servo and pontificated about developing a product, of course controlled by software. He skipped the part where a bit of research leads you to the already common "thermostatic mixing valve".

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

#676

Post by ComputerGuru »

Aurornis wrote: post #167
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 throu…

Yup. This works until it doesn’t (fairly soon thereafter), both from experimentation and understanding of theory. Here’s an illustrative example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1l1qxk9/why_does_gemi...

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

#677

Post by andai »

Aurornis wrote: post #167
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 throu…

Yeah a lot of focus lately on making context windows enormous and putting everything in them. (It should know every detail of your life!) But in my experience LLMs are extremely "prime-able" and also tend to hyperfixate on details.

So when asking difficult questions I tend to remove as much context as possible, rather than adding it. I don't want it to reflect my own ideas or biases back to me, I want an actually fresh perspective.

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

#678

Post by QuantumNoodle »

kgeist wrote: post #341

A few years ago (before the AI craze), I was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. I had a chronic cough, and an outsourced radiologist at a clinic found signs of tuberculosis. The findings were sent to the city's tuberculosis hospital, as required by the country's law. The doctors there took the radiologist's conclusion at face value and required me to stay at their hospital for at least 8 months under a strict, prison-li…

Your TB stories made me recall my (fond) TB stories. I came from a country that requires tuberculosis vaccines as a school-entry requirement. I have the vaccine and antibodies. Then moved to a country that didn't have this requirement but I had to be tested to make sure I didn't have TB for things like camps, college, etc. The test is something like a vaccine that injects only dead TB cells, if the injection site welts up from anti-bodies then you had to get another whole panel of tests (like X-ray of lungs). Thankfully I've never had it but TB is apparently no joke. Though blasting my chest with radiation is no healthier :p

Anyway, thanks for sharing!

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

#679

Post by nozzlegear »

bpicolo wrote: post #624
KingMob wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny (and a little depressing), because HN routinely assumes that their world view, and thus, their domain expertise, transfers. There's no shortage of tech people convinced they deeply understand law, medicine, philosophy, etc. despite never having read much on the topics.

The internet at large is full of armchair experts, it's not just a tech thing.

People in tech have particularly big armchairs though.

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

#680

Post by kensai »

As a neurologist I read often imaging findings myself. However, one ability of the radiologists I appreciate is their ability to discern through artifacts by years of experience. I am not convinced the current AI crop can reach this level of discerning yet. But I am pretty sure they will reach us and surpass us there as well.

For the moment, I would prefer the final opinion always to be from a human (the human-in-the-loop approach in medicine). Best course of action is to run these LLM assessments and bring them to the next appointment and challenge constructively the doctor.

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