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CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

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Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#61
post #27
post #19

Brother-in-law graduated med school in the early 90s and has been a practicing ER physician since. We discussed this recently and he related that his advisors told him not to go into radiology back in the late 80s because the assumption was that computers were going to take over the field. He's not too far away from retirement and it's only now that we're starting to see some signs of this prediction from 30+ years a…

The issue with radiologists is that on average they are able to spot ~35% of correct diagnoses, while the world's best radiologists ~45%. AI might get us to ~50% which is ~15% better than an average radiologist (who still needs to review it).

Maybe radiologist mean something different in my country, but here radiologist don't diagnose (i mean, except you see them for a broken bone or something), oncologist do. I did an observation internship with a radiologist when i was 20 (95% of my family are doctor/nurses/PT, i wanted to know what a degree in physics could help me do in the field, and radiologist was the only path to medecine from my initial formation where i only lost a year, and not two). You spend your time calculating doses, finding patient history, and calibrating machines, it's much more a technician role than a MD. In any case, and even if in the US radiologist diagnose cancer, that's such a small part of their job it shouldn't matter.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#62
post #8

> Sandra Scott, MD, CEO of the One Brooklyn Health, a small hospital facing tight margins, agreed with this line of thinking, according to Crain’s. Does this CEO of a small hospital realize that their hospital will take the legal responsibility if there's no doctor to sue for malpractice?

This works in the other direction too - a human mises a cancer, that 10 out of 10 radiology models say it's there with 99% confidence. That hospital will lose in court for negligence.

Is this the norm in US courts, evaluating a human's performance against LLMs?

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#63
post #49

I find the whole field of radiology to be utterly baffling. There are doctors who specialize in, and hopefully understand, specific diseases and/or parts of the body. But we have radiologists who are supposed to be able to look at images, taken by quite a variety of technologies and parameters, of any part of the body, and are expected to accurately interpret the findings, possibly without any relevant context. In my…

Radiologists work best in consultation with the physicians ordering the studies. Sadly, this is less and less common as workloads increase in medicine. When I started 20 years ago there were whole teams that came through the radiology department every morning to review all of the cases on their patients. Now I go weeks without seeing another physician.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#65

Here we go again. There's something about radiology that makes it the perfect bait for nerd sniping. I guess it's probably the misunderstanding that it is exclusively pattern recognition. Here are my opinions, after a 20 year career as a diagnostic radiologist, and 45 years as a hobbyist computer programmer 1. There are no products currently on the market that can replace a radiologist. 2. If you can't fully and comp…

To support your point, my dentist office did a trial using AI to read the xrays they take of your jaw and teeth. According to the AI reading my xray, I needed every single filling in my teeth replaced because they were all showing signs of leaking.

The dentist reviewed it and told me that there's just too much variation in how places to fillings and the different densities of the filling and the replaced tooth material for the AI to make good judgements. He didn't think any of my fillings would need replacing I likely have many more years before they fail.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#66

Here we go again. There's something about radiology that makes it the perfect bait for nerd sniping. I guess it's probably the misunderstanding that it is exclusively pattern recognition. Here are my opinions, after a 20 year career as a diagnostic radiologist, and 45 years as a hobbyist computer programmer 1. There are no products currently on the market that can replace a radiologist. 2. If you can't fully and comp…

Its hysterically funny you are being downvoted...

Sometimes people can't tolerate hearing other's lived experiences.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#67
post #53

> "and is “actually better than human beings,” he told the audience. “For women who aren’t considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it’s wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000,” Lubarsky said. " What's the false negative rate for human beings? And what about women that are considered high risk? Is it better or worse?

I'm also suspicious of that 3 out of 10k times. Did they compare an AI examination against a human 10,000 times in novel scenarios? Or did they run it against some data set that's probably in the training data? Or did they run it against some synthetic dataset that is not a good representation of the real world? Or did they run 5 tests, found zero inaccuracies and extrapolated to 10,000 but though 0 mistakes was too…

"wrong" is a false negative. It says that if the test came back negative, it was wrong 3 in 10,000 times, which means there was actually cancer that it didn't find

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#68

I figured this was “CEO said a thing” journalism [1], but buried in the last paragraph is a real scorcher: > “Undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients: easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care,” [Radiologist Dr.] Suhail told Radiology Business. “Any attempt to implement AI-only reads would immediately result in patient ha…

If hospitals are so concerned about cutting costs, getting sued is probably worse. However they are all insured against malpractice. I would be careful about insurers who could default if they find too many malpractice claims.

>If hospitals are so concerned about cutting costs, getting sued is probably worse.

That hasn't stopped them any other time they cut costs. Have you ever spoken to a nurse who works in a hospital?

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#69
post #49

I find the whole field of radiology to be utterly baffling. There are doctors who specialize in, and hopefully understand, specific diseases and/or parts of the body. But we have radiologists who are supposed to be able to look at images, taken by quite a variety of technologies and parameters, of any part of the body, and are expected to accurately interpret the findings, possibly without any relevant context. In my…

Irrelevant to them. A radiologist is on the hook for missing a tiny possible tumor in a scan for a blood clot.

They like to show off occasionally. We had a rectal foreign body that was described as a Phillips-head screwdriver. I was hoping to catch them out by noticing it was Pozidriv, but it was in fact a Phillips.

Re: CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

#70
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works in the other direction too - a human mises a cancer, that 10 out of 10 radiology models say it's there with 99% confidence. That hospital will lose in court for negligence.

Is this the norm in US courts, evaluating a human's performance against LLMs?

If it is a regular practice of such doctors to use such tools, and that doctor did not, then it is malpractice. That is how malpractice works. You have to fall below the standard of care in a way that proximately caused the damages.
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