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AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

bbc.com

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Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#81

Post by alistairSH »

fn-mote wrote: post #55
alistairSH wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what % of GP skin consults result in a referral? If it’s even remotely close to a majority, seems like it would be better just going straight to the dermatologist. Sample of one, but every spot (5+ over the past decade) I’ve asked my dermatologist about has resulted in a biopsy and of those several were cancer.

> every spot (5+ over the past decade) I’ve asked my dermatologist about has resulted in a biopsy Not to be too cynical but... is there a financial incentive for them to do a biopsy? Of course it might be best practice as well.

I’m sure there is an incentive, but at least in my case the rate of biopsy to confirm cancers is greater than 50% so it certainly seems to me like the biopsies are in fact warranted.

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#82

Post by andy99 »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #80
andy99 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question doesn't make sense imo because it, meaning neural network or other ML computer vision classification, doesn't have a mechanism to be trustworthy. It's just looking for shortcuts with predictive power, it's not reasoning, doesn't have a world model, it's just an equation that mostly works, etc, all the stuff we know about ML. It's not just about validation set performance, you could change the lighting or…

I understood that you don't believe it can be made reliable. But my question was: what if it were? Let me put it differently. Suppose I don't tell you it's ML. It's a machine that you don't know how it works, but I let you do all the tests you want, and turns out they're great. Would you then still be against it?

If my grandmother was a tractor, would she have wheels?

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#83

Post by lamename »

> "At the moment that technology is limited because you need a dermoscopic lens which the public wouldn't necessarily have access to, but I'm sure with time the technology will advance and we will have effective apps that patients can access from the comfort of their own home."

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#84

Post by greazy »

consp wrote: post #28
verst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is AI to you? Neural nets only? LLMs? I still have my textbook from almost 20 years ago: "Artificial Intelligence: A modern" by Peter Norvig. Lots of topics covered as AI there that surely do not meet your definition.

AI is buzzword bingo and has been since introduced to computing in the 60's. Just clasify the method used as what it is to a supposedly educated crowd. There is no need to classify a marketing term. And yes, for that book it's also just marketing.

Agreed, AI is a marketing term. Use the underlying methods and technology.

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#85

Post by greazy »

verst wrote: post #27
greazy wrote: post #11

This is ML. I guess AI term can apply here but I think it's a bit disingenuous to advertise as such. People will conflate the term with llm chat bots. https://skin-analytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Artifi...

What is AI to you? Neural nets only? LLMs? I still have my textbook from almost 20 years ago: "Artificial Intelligence: A modern" by Peter Norvig. Lots of topics covered as AI there that surely do not meet your definition.

I've relented, I accept now that AI is an umbrella term to represent many different methods, algorithms and technologies.

Modern day usage of AI is heavily conflated with generative AI such as LLMs and Text-to-* generation systems.

My preference, as someone who works in a very closely relate field to the article, is that science should stay away from non-specific terms like AI. I've had my director approach me seeking grant ideas on using AI. It didn't go down very well when I suggested we should try to use image recognition to automate data entry. That seemed 'old', they wanted a chat bot to do... something.

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#86

Post by BillinghamJ »

andy99 wrote: post #78
jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it was really reliable? Would you still be against it?

The question doesn't make sense imo because it, meaning neural network or other ML computer vision classification, doesn't have a mechanism to be trustworthy. It's just looking for shortcuts with predictive power, it's not reasoning, doesn't have a world model, it's just an equation that mostly works, etc, all the stuff we know about ML. It's not just about validation set performance, you could change the lighting or…

How trustworthy really are humans?

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#87

Post by Scoundreller »

zdragnar wrote: post #52
Scoundreller wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friend did a lot of work in Africa. Got back to the US and starts getting symptomatic and says to himself “I think I got malaria”. Goes to the biggest university hospital nearby he can find. Was initially dismissed but waited it out for the infectious diseases specialist and they quickly agreed with his self-diagnosis. They kept them in hospital for a few days so a parade of clinical students/residents could come by…

Weird. Pretty much every time I've gone to a doctor (in the Midwest US, no less) for an illness, the second question they ask is always "have you been out of the country recently?" just to rule out anything caught from abroad. Then again, my one experience with a university hospital was pretty shitty, so maybe that's it?

This was decades ago, so maybe getting asked regularly nowadays was because of that previous education.

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#88

Post by jgerrish »

alistairSH wrote: post #17
timewizard wrote: post #14

> The hospital gets about 7,000 urgent skin cancer referrals each year, but only 5% turn out to be cancer. It seems to be that you could be doing a _much_ better job of filtering this pipeline before it gets to this point. How can so many _urgent_ cases end up being negative? They're using AI to solve a problem that probably shouldn't exist.

And why are skin cancers being referred to a hospital at all? Personal experience in the US... treatment can be done on the spot at the primary dermatologist's office (curettage usually) or referred either to a Mohs specialist or a plastic surgeon (both of whom usually treat at their office). Short of a melanoma that's progressed/metastasized, I don't think I've ever heard of a skin cancer being treated at a hospital…

> And why are skin cancers being referred to a hospital at all?

I'm working on deciphering the Google Mock API right now. It's just one of those fucking things you do, you know? Figuring out how to set expectations on parameters, etc. Hundreds of thousands of SDEs and students went through it before it became second nature.

I dream of playing around with some future testing language where I can build mock blocks in a Scratch-like manner. Awesome, eh?

Fuck yeah, Alan Kay.

Maybe I could work on the team that builds it.

But who am I kidding? I get to be pushed into other work while I waste time to filling out unnecessary tax paperwork.

Because to get more medical lab work done, I need to have authentic IRS transcripts.

A written 1040 isn't enough.

Otherwise I have to go to the hospital to get imaging.

It wasn't necessary. Signed fully electronic non-forgible IRS forms for health purposes could have been done with minimal citizen pushback.

With, and this is key, an educated public who understood the economics.

So I'll work on wasting my time educating loved ones on the economics of paper-less forms and all forms of monopolies while I say no to future shows in Chicago or Canada or wherever.

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#89

Post by [deleted] »

andy99 wrote: post #82
jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood that you don't believe it can be made reliable. But my question was: what if it were? Let me put it differently. Suppose I don't tell you it's ML. It's a machine that you don't know how it works, but I let you do all the tests you want, and turns out they're great. Would you then still be against it?

If my grandmother was a tractor, would she have wheels?

[deleted]

Re: AI used for skin cancer checks at London hospital

#90

Post by potatoman22 »

OJFord wrote: post #73
cmcaleer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's so easy, then why do people die from having lesions misdiagnosed as benign? Even if the success rate of the human eye was in the 99.5%+ range, why not have an extra sanity check from an AI model?

Because this non-AI function 'correctly diagnoses 100% benign cases as benign': def is_benign(mole: Image) -> bool: return True ...but also misdiagnoses 100% malignant cases.

To contextualize, I think the tool in this article correctly diagnoses 97% benign cases as benign but misdiagnosis 22% of malignant cases.
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