51–58 of 58 posts
Diagnosing is a actually a rather small part (but very important) of my daily job as a physician. Doctors can't be replaced by computers and robots at the moment because much of what I do is listening, comforting, reassuring, educating, managing, administrating etc etc.
We urgently need better computer support tools. Will doctors be replaced my robots? When you feel comfortable being comforted by a robot they will.
I hear people saying that medicine can't have doctors be replaced by computers and it's more of an art than a science. I'd like to get more information and see why they think that and if their reasons really hold up. It intuitively seems to me computers can do a better job. Here are a few reasons: 1) When you think about what a doctor does, they use a combination of their memory, experience, knowledge and judgment. 2…
There's factors you're completely missing. One of the things doctors do is ferret out information that the patient doesn't volunteer - they socially manage the patient to divulge information. Until we have diagnostic computers that can pick up on non-verbal cues and other such nuances, we'll have doctors.
I hear people saying that medicine can't have doctors be replaced by computers and it's more of an art than a science. I'd like to get more information and see why they think that and if their reasons really hold up. It intuitively seems to me computers can do a better job. Here are a few reasons: 1) When you think about what a doctor does, they use a combination of their memory, experience, knowledge and judgment. 2…
There's factors you're completely missing. One of the things doctors do is ferret out information that the patient doesn't volunteer - they socially manage the patient to divulge information. Until we have diagnostic computers that can pick up on non-verbal cues and other such nuances, we'll have doctors.
I'd like to make two points. Firstly, before anyone builds an AI that can look after people, maybe they can fix the software for looking at Xrays WHICH ALWAYS STOPS WORKING IN THE MIDDLE OF A BUSY CLINIC. Secondly, I challenge someone here to put a number on how much it would cost to produce an AI that can operate robustly in a clinical environment. This includes the costs of developing such a thing, deploying it as…
I think in some ways we're thinking of automation in the wrong way. That doesn't have to mean having having an AI doctor, with, you know, a lovely bedside manner. Reducing the cost of blood tests so that you can do a sweeping diagnosis of 50 problems at once rather than just 10 is a sort of automation - the doctor no longer has to carefully navigate their way through "there's a chance that it is this, but the blood t…
As an aside, the really interesting part of image analysis is not that we can automatically detect tumor cells, but that machine learning can extract features from pathology specimens that a human could never see:
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The fact that the discipline is incredibly nuanced is precisely why I want computers doing the heavy lifting, at least when it comes to diagnosis. I find it extremely hard to believe that even the best doctors could come close to touching the accuracy of an expert system. Now, obviously there is still the necessity of a trained and skilled doctor. A doctor should always have the last decision (before the patient, tha…
I wish doctors would at least pretend that they're doing something that a walk-in x-Ray booth attached to a computer system couldn't do. They are doing more, but won't always feel the need to show their working for minor illness. That doctor will probably have gone through a few checklists in their head, deciding whether this could be a serious illness, and clearly came to the conclusion it was not. Presumably they a…
I don't understand. That scenario is a perfect example of something an expert system would excel at.
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The fact that the discipline is incredibly nuanced is precisely why I want computers doing the heavy lifting, at least when it comes to diagnosis. I find it extremely hard to believe that even the best doctors could come close to touching the accuracy of an expert system. Now, obviously there is still the necessity of a trained and skilled doctor. A doctor should always have the last decision (before the patient, tha…
I can't see the part in your story where you found out what the chest pain was and that any form of diagnosing entity [sh|w]ould have picked it up.
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I wish doctors would at least pretend that they're doing something that a walk-in x-Ray booth attached to a computer system couldn't do. They are doing more, but won't always feel the need to show their working for minor illness. That doctor will probably have gone through a few checklists in their head, deciding whether this could be a serious illness, and clearly came to the conclusion it was not. Presumably they a…
> Accuracy is not what is required, given our extremely poor and fuzzy knowledge of the human body, diagnosis and treatment is more like a tradeoff between different possibilities based on partial symptoms (not all symptoms will be obvious or noticed by the patient), tests which are not always accurate and sometimes harmful, and treatments which are not always effective and have some bad side effects. I don't underst…
Translating what the patient thinks is happening into a set of symptoms, sometimes those two are far apart
Finding problems the patient came in for but is too embarrassed to talk about or is even unaware of
Explaining risk to patients in terms they will understand, and then choosing an appropriate treatment based on their often fuzzy and emotional response
Weighing patient risk against an individual patient's needs or other ailments which an expert system is not going to be able to query about or be aware of.
etc.
There's certainly a huge and growing place for expert systems in healthcare, but suggesting they can replace doctors is pretty absurd at this point in time.
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Oh, sure, there's an infinite amount of (generalized) health care people might want to consume if the prices are low enough. You can get there either by lowering the pay of health care people, or by making them more productive per humman-hour, eg via automation or just better business practices.
There are two prices of health care I have to pay. One is the up front cash (or monthly insurance) cost I have to pay, the other is the massive time sink and general pain and inconvenience it is to get it. I live in country where the cash cost is basically zero, yet I consume as little health care as possible due to the high second cost. In fact the times I do need health care I often opt to pay more up front to avoi…