I do think AI has a chance to make healthcare, for cancer and other diseases, a lot more proactive. Even though we know prognosis is much better for cancer, and many other diseases, if you catch it early, we do essentially nothing to catch it early. My understanding is that this is because: 1. Administering regular MRIs, blood panels, etc. is expensive, in terms of the initial data collection 2. It’s also expensive,…
There are also downstream consequences of ordering tests aside from cost; not all tests are harmless. As an example, regular screening for prostate cancer isn't recommended as much. Partially because it is often so slow-growing that people often die of other causes before the cancer even begins to cancer, and because the definitive test is a biopsy which is somewhat invasive. Rates of complications are relatively low…
For the other point, personally I don’t really buy the argument of “it’s better not to know you have cancer X, because it might end up being low impact.” If we had excellent regular screening, yes detection of low impact cancers would become a lot more common, but I think people’s perception of them would change too. If it became a common thing for cancers to be detected, but the detection could reliably say “this is likely low impact, we should just keep an eye on it but not treat it”, this would be a lot less scary. It would become normalized IMO. Cancer diagnoses are partly so scary right now because we’re often mostly catching cancers that have progressed and are causing symptoms, so the public perception is rightly “cancer diagnosis = very scary.”