Slashdot Mirror
When AI Botches Your Medical Diagnosis, Who's To Blame? (qz.com)
Robert Hart has posed an interested question in his report on Quartz: When artificial intelligence botches your medical diagnosis, who's to blame? Do you blame the AI, designer or organization? It's just one of many questions popping up and starting to be seriously pondered by experts as artificial intelligence and automation continue to become more entwined into our daily lives. From the report: The prospect of being diagnosed by an AI might feel foreign and impersonal at first, but what if you were told that a robot physician was more likely to give you a correct diagnosis? Medical error is currently the third leading cause of death in the U.S., and as many as one in six patients in the British NHS receive incorrect diagnoses. With statistics like these, it's unsurprising that researchers at Johns Hopkins University believe diagnostic errors to be "the next frontier for patient safety." Of course, there are downsides. AI raises profound questions regarding medical responsibility. Usually when something goes wrong, it is a fairly straightforward matter to determine blame. A misdiagnosis, for instance, would likely be the responsibility of the presiding physician. A faulty machine or medical device that harms a patient would likely see the manufacturer or operator held to account. What would this mean for an AI?
Who the fuck else!
So the computer produces a list of possible diagnosis. This list I understand is called a "differential diagnosis" and may have as few as 2 or 3 items or as many as several hundred.
I would expect that this diagnosis list, as well as a management plan, to be then put in the hands of a human. After a series of tests I would expect the AI to be consulted again if necessary.
In today's world and probably the near future, say the next decade, I doubt that medicine will become "autodoc" "robotic physician" the holographic "Doctor" or some "magic cryokit" There will be a human with a powerful tool to aid in diagnosis of the patient.
Now, what will happen in 50 years, that is to be seen.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
...blame the parents or the school?
AI insurance.
Nah, they never take responsibility for their actions.
They're not even a real country anyway....
But to be more serious, this is going to become a serious problem soon. Whether it's cars or medical diagnosis or some other AI application. I think promoters of AI underestimate just how outraged the public will be when someone is "killed by an evil robot." Human error we can understand and sometimes condemn. But I think there's the potential for a lot more backlash even for minor incidents with AI -- and even if they likely wouldn't have been preventable by a human doctor/driver/whatever. At that point, it won't matter that the stats say it actually saves more lives overall, if the error or the death is egregious enough.
A misdiagnosis by a human physician can only be analyzed and argued about. A misdiagnosis by an AI physician can be forensically investigated. It can even be perfectly reenacted, both with the same and different inputs. That would allow, for example, a determination of whether the fault was a design flaw or a problem with the supplied inputs.
This would allow for very precise determination of responsibility. Today, if the patient omits some medically relevant detail and a misdiagnosis occurs, the human physician can only argue that he could have possibly come to a different conclusion with the additional information. With an AI, we can feed the updated parameters to it and actually see whether the result would or would not have been different. If the result would have in fact been different and correct, then the fault lies with the patient, or possible whomever was responsible for collecting the input data. If the result would not have changed, then there is a possible design flaw for which the developer/manufacturer may be held liable.
In my mind, this can only mean an improvement from where things currently stand.
A true self-aware artificial intelligence? I blame him/her/it and the organization that they work for.
For anything else I blame the designer and the organization that they work for.
It's not that hard.
The one with the deepest pocket is the one to blame. If others have any resources the ambulance chasers will go after them too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When everything has become so complex that nobody can understand anything we're going to be at the mercy of the machines anyway. As with software the error is so diffuse as to be untraceable; there's practically no way to know where a line of code has come from. Similarly in a neural network you'll never know which erroneous sample in the training set tipped the balance. Worse, in AI there isn't even an audit trail so you can never hope to find out.
It's simple: Handle this like nuclear science.
When someone living near a nuclear reactor gets cancer we blame it on poor life choices, bad genes or that one cigarette they smoked when they were 12 and found out they didn't like it. Just blame it on something else that makes less money or isn't as hip/cool.
Deez nutz.
A faulty machine or medical device that harms a patient would likely see the manufacturer or operator held to account. What would this mean for an AI?
The exact same? Hold the manufacturer or operator accountable.
There IS such a thing as a stupid question. This is one.
Obviously whoever hired him is to blame.
After seeing his performance in "Like a Surgeon" I'm surprised anyone would hire him to diagnose anything.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm sorry, I just don't believe that medical error is the third greatest cause of death.That's just stupid. Nobody in his right mind would ever go to a doctor if the odds were that high. Does anybody ever question the stats people toss around these days?
Why does someone need to be blamed? Mistakes happen. Nothing is 100% perfect. Not humans, not AI. Can't you see how detrimental your culture's 'OMG gotta sue someone claim money someone is ALWAYS liable' mentality is?
Most medical mistakes that result in death are not caused by misdiagnosis, though that does occur. Most of them are from a combination of surgical mistakes and human error while dispensing/choosing medication. There are a lot of much easier ways to reduce medical mistakes without going so far as to replace doctors with a computer.
Even if the only thing we did was require that every packet of medication was tagged with a barcode and require that appropriate people scan the patient's chart and the barcode prior to dispensing it to verify that it is the medicine prescribed, we'd save a decent number of lives.
And if computers also did checks for contraindications (giving aspirin to someone with a history of bleeding ulcers, giving antibiotics in conjunction with Lipitor, giving any number of drugs with MAOIs, etc.), it would save even more lives.
Notice that neither of these even requires AI. They just require proper electronic medical records and some pretty basic coding skills.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
had to say it
Than it's you're fault. This is how AI is gonna kill people first, blind belief in it.
Is it too early to be disappointed in Slashdot again? Maybe someone will post a funny joke that actually gets some funny mod points? Ditto insightful, eh? Even an actually interesting or informative comment? Not holding my breath. Short summary: No such luck yet (and including keyword searches).
Ever hear the old philosophy joke: "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?"
The equivalent question for today's feeble article is: "If a corporation's AI botches your diagnosis and there is no one to sue, does your death still matter?"
You may safely anticipate that the EULA will protect the AI from liability much more than it protects the patient from mistakes or software glitches, no matter how egregious and flagrant. Actually, the hierarchy of protection will probably go something like (1) Corporation that created the AI, (2) Corporation that is licensing the AI, (3) The hospital corporation, (4) The doctors who use the AI, and so on. They may remember to include the patient somewhere in there, or maybe not.
Compare to Dr Mayo's motto: "The best interest of the patient is the only interest to be considered..." The current incorporated Mayo Clinic still mentions patients on the website, but I couldn't find such a strong form.
Not sure what the trigger was, but I recently realized that individuals don't count now. It's only the biggest corporations and political parties that matter. I had still been clinging to some delusions from my "respect for the individual" days, but now the individual is just a cog, and the only question is which cog can do the job most cheaply before being discarded. Trigger might have been the book Hitlerland , which has NO relation to #PresidentTweety, since it was published some years ago. Not even sure if I want to recommend it, though it's still bothering me...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Our desire to place blame is partly due to our nature of always trying to understand in absolutes processes to complex to ever go there but mostly due to our current economic system which rewards those who blame.
As the necessity for people to work is automated away, many of us are going to choose to be satisfied with what we can have without working in order to get off this silly train of always trying to be better than our neighbors. We're tired of it.
We're not going to continue working to climb higher when where we are at is fine, and we aren't going to care who is to blame when something that is way better than it was before is still not perfect.
When you're not busting your butt every day for nothing but vanity, you become a lot more forgiving.
It's a stupid question that illustrates a misunderstanding about what diagnosis is.
If a fortune teller fails to predict you're going to get hit by a bus tomorrow, who's to blame, her, her crystal ball or it's manufacturer?
Physicians misdiagnose patients all the time because diagnosis depends on a variety of imperfect information and very often cannot be done accurately. That is nobody's fault.
Physicians also misdiagnose patients all the time because they aren't very good at keeping up with new developments in medicine or are otherwise negligent. That's their fault.
An AI could be wrong for the first reason. If so, nobody is at fault. If the AI is wrong because of a manufacturing defect, the manufacturer is at fault, or the supervising physician is, if they insist on being in that position.
Blame obama
faggot
Mitigation of risk doesn't have to always mean having someone to blame for the mistakes.
For years, I'd been misdiagnosed with blood pressure issues, and spent upwards of a hundred thousand dollars over the years between medication, therapies, various doctors, and even holistic healthcare options.
Finally. I had a good Doctor point at a picture of my brain and say 'the problem is here'.
Turns out, I have naturally occuring high blood pressure and the stress of being told I had a problem was actually causing the symptoms to magnify, and the medication, seeking to rectify a problem that didn't exist, only exacerbated the problem.
Sure. I could have sued. But most doctors aren't deeply educated in psychology nor do they keep up to date with current medical practices as they probably should. But the fact of the matter was - my problems largely went away when I quit believing I had a problem.
So to answer your question. The most important thing about AI is this - it should be used to augment and support a regular doctor's perspective and labor. Not to replace it. Without the insight of a human with a body similar to yours to provide perspective on your body, there is inbuilt bias in the diagnosis that may actually cause more problems. This isn't to say AI isn;t of value, it certainly is - to provide a unique perspective - but as a replacement for humans, that's just foolishness.
So to answer your question. Who's to blame?
The AI SHOULD be built and developed to partner with humans and supplement them. Not to replace them. So this question should never come up.
The doctor. All of these systems are marketed and sold with the proviso that these provide only advice for the physician. This is to make sure that liability is clearly allocated. And notice that it's not the software company accepting this liability.
That is all.
Whoever thought the AI was accurate enough is to blame, that is, the person who approved its use for that patient and then signed off on the diagnosis. I mean, people are verifying this stuff right? It's not like the AI has any authority itself.
Twinstiq, game news
...sure who's to blame because I don't have a tattoo.
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
People lived short brutish lives in our ancient history, 30,000 years ago, often dying around age 30. If girls didn't get started reproducing just as soon as they hit puberty, they might not have lived long enough to see that their own children made it to puberty themselves; people had to reproduce early, the species literately depended on it. Therefore, it's no coincidence that the age of puberty is somewhere around half the age of 30. It also explains why there are so many people accused of being pedophiles, that's the way nature has made some of us, to be attracted to youth as a reproductive strategy. But rather than discuss why there seems to be so many “pedophiles”, we chose to just throw them in jail. Truth is, it's the way nature made them through evolution.
We are still running on 200,000 year old software, and no stupid, recently created, feel good, socially constructed laws are going to change that. There was no supportive social services in those ancient times, and young girls who lost their families either died or grew up quick. The ones that were attracted to older men survived, and eventually reproduced. That is why you have girls who like older men, and men who like young girls. It's an adaptive strategy that worked in the past, simple as that. Men taking in young girls was natures answer to a social safety net.
It also explains why the model industry has such young models, they know men are attracted to youth, beauty and neoteny (look up the word). No one really thought much of it back in the day when Calvin Klein was using a 14 year old Brook Shields as a model. Only recently are people outraged so much over so little. I really think it is so the deep state can use it as a way to control our politicians. Makes you wonder.
Why persecute people for the way nature made them if they are not hurting anyone? No wonder the birth rate in western civilization is declining. Unfortunately, as always, religious prudes are standing in the way of sound reason but try to get your heads around the idea, it's a sound theory. It very well might have made the difference between the human race surviving, and not to acknowledge this possibility is just being unreasonable. The economy has changed but our biology hasn't. There is nothing wrong with being attracted to girls, and boys, around the age of puberty. It's just recently that young people can't find work, and people are stretching their child like behavior all the way into their 30's.
Throwing people in jail for having an interest in young girls, and boys, around the age of puberty is just predatory policing for money, just like with drugs. Lawyers, politicians, law enforcement types, persecuting people for non-violent crimes that shouldn't even be crimes in the first place, like drugs, which is really just to defend the racketeering of the medical/phama industry, and to prop up their socialist make-work jobs.
Being attracted to youth doesn't make one a monster, it's the way nature made us. What does make one a monster is destroying the lives of innocent men, and women, who did nothing more than follow their human nature. Not only does it destroy the lives of men when they are taken to prison but destroys the lives of the families, and pets, that depend on them. Think of all the poor animals that get hauled off to animal shelters,and get killed because their owners get put in prison for stupid, non-violent crimes, feeding the prison industry. If I was a cop, I would have trouble sleeping at night for thinking about all the lives I've destroyed.
Morality is just an abstract concept, a social construct created by parochial minded religious people that are trying to make you submit to their antiquated group think. They often craft shaming language toward you, accusing you of having a “high hope for a low heaven." Evil and morality are points of view. Picture a cat playing with a mouse. To the cat, he is just playing with his food. To the mou
until I can get cheaper Medical Service by excluding a doctor, I feel the doctor is liable. If I can choose a discount and use AI with published results and make my own choice, that's on me.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
the operator may sue the manufacturer, but you should sue whoever you bought the service from(doctor/hospital).
look, it's pretty much the same already now if you go get your eyes lasered and messed around with - the machine does 100% of the actual operation and the doctor is there just to press stop. but it's still his fault if something is fucked up.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
AI is a tool just like any other one, and blaming toolmakers is not a new thing. In most accidents, be it a medical one or a car/train/airplane crash, there are more than one factors in play, and determining who is responsible is far from straightforward. Currently, this is governed by a complex mesh of standards, regulations and ToS-es. Those are already very confusing: if you put unusually large tires on your car and then speed, can you sue the manufacturer because the speedo underreported? And now with automation gaining foothold everywhere, things are changing faster than government regulators could react.
Solving this problem would require a massive overhaul of our current legal system. I kinda like the idea of cascading responsibility. In a medical example, a patient wronged would first sue the doctor for every mistake he believes was made. The doctor then could start a cascade suit against the hospital if he believes he was supplied with improper equipment or hospital conditions are to blame. If he wins, the hospital would take his place in the suit for the mistakes that they were proven to be liable of. They could also start their own cascade against the manufacturer in a similar fashion. At the end of the day, the patient wouldn't have to figure out who is actually responsible (an almost impossible task), the members of the chain would settle that somehow. And the system ensures that someone is always left picking up the tab.
Wasn't there a scene in a movie about this, where poorly-behaved robots were tortured with hot irons on the feet and similar? I mean, if the AI messes up, then I can only assume the AI is to blame; don't we just slow down its power cycles or something like that?
But can anyone point me to more of this girl? (Link warning)
The AI vendor and/or user could be required to carry liability insurance. The better the AI (fewer catastrophic errors), the lower the premium.
Nobody in his right mind would ever go to a doctor if the odds were that high.
That depends on the nature of the "medical error". I expect that the vast majority of these cases are people who have a serious condition which is misdiagnosed or incorrectly treated and because the condition is not treated it eventually kills them i.e. they die from the condition. If true then going to the doctor results in a 67% chance of proper treatment and possible survival vs. no going which will be 100% fatal.
To be worse off going to the doctor there has to be a serious risk that the treatment of a minor condition is so seriously botched that it kills you when the condition itself would not. This seems far less likely.
If we could all just stop looking for the whipping-boy every time something goes wrong, that would be great.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Who has the medical license, the AI or the Dr. using it ? You don't sue the gun manufacturer, or the stethoscope company, they are just tools used by the licensed to 'practice' medicine doctor.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If only there was some organization that provides a safety net in case something like this happens. In exchange for a small fee (whether through taxes or however else it's implemented), patients get economically protected should a misdiagnosis causes problems.
Maybe the safety net could be called "insurance". Perhaps it may be possible to do a for-profit organization under this concept.
If the AI turns out to be more accurate, then that would make insurance payouts less frequent.
If you want to minimize problems, you can have the AI provide the most likely issues, and a competent human doctor make sure that the diagnosis is sane.
But who can get you unblocked listed form the pre-existing conditions list?
The same 'person' gets blamed in the future as does now days, it doesn't matter! The insurance company pays.
Same as with a self driving car.
With millions of samples undertaken every day, billions over the span of a year we can postulate that even an error rate of 0.1% will add up to a huge civil action when the root causation is discovered!
This is not a real problem.
Normally AI systems gets tested against history data (with perfect knowledge of future outcome and also of previous human doctor decision). So we should know in advance the error rate of the AI system (and the error rate of the human). If the humans were better, nobody will use the AI.
So the AI just needs an liability insurance (which should be cheaper than for the human Dr, because fault rate is smaller)
Who else?
I don't know, but it's only a misdemeanor to beat the metallic shit of them.
Table-ized A.I.
Humans usually want to blame somebody else for their problems. Create an AI to feel as satisfying scapegoat as possible to the human blamer. It will make the human happy and with that the problem is solved.
The solution space is on the order of 10^80 dimensions.
Can an AI sign a contract? No not today. Maybe some day. Until then make sure to bring a lawyer
The IT guy's malpractice insurance naturally.
Presumably these AI systems are being sold to treatment centers (hospitals/medical clinics) that can offer treatment once the correct diagnoses is given. Assuming they are charging you for the diagnoses I would think the clear liability would fall with them. In theory they will take out insurance policies to deal with these issues (and add this cost to their prices). This is very similar to today's situation with just a lower chance of getting it wrong. This should result in lower insurance rates which would lower the cost of diagnoses.
I would also assume a less accurate version of these algorithms will be available for free (e.g. WebMD) but it will very hard to sue these types as they will not be licensed. These forms of diagnoses will not be accepted at treatment centers as they will then have to take on the liability for mis-diagnoses. This is like a neighbor giving you medical advice and you asking a doctor to act upon that advice.
You blame the doctor. Then you lead the priestesses of Kubebe on a jihad against Richese and then on to destroy the thinking machines.
When "AI" is being thrown about, are we talking inference engines that can build up a knowledge base and extrapolate from this into new/unseen cases? Or are we really just talking about "statistical fitting" with larger datasets and more complex models (neural nets, etc)? Because if it's the latter, there is real problems with data quality and out-of-training-set results that must be addressed. Look at the 50+ year history of QSAR in drug design as an example of the problems that have to be dealt with.
Retrospective analyses abound. Prospective ones, not so much.
Oh, and a botched diagnosis should also go in the pool of training cases for future AIs.
Of course the AI has to go to jail. Or perhaps electrocuted or what. It won't be as spectacular as hanging an elephant, but the revenge-based justice has to be kept up! It's our Civilization, after all!
First, remove the AI and have an actual human do it. Human intuition will pick up things that even IBM's betrayal of humanity won't.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The medical licensing authority that licensed a machine to practice medicine.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This type of question is a non-existant dilemma.
The concept of blame should disappear if you are diagnosed by a system that is orders of magnitude more precise than any human could ever be. AFAIK that is exactly the point of medical AIs like Watson. If maintained well, a system like Watson can "know" things a human or an entire army of human medical experts could never know, can process cross-reference cases and drug interference and genetic information at a speed, scale and accuracy that will make the last 500 years of advancement in medicine look like a pre-school exercise in comparsion. Miss- or non-diagnosis by human medical experts is high, and we wouldn't be happier about it if we have someone to blame. Doctors can only operate because there are catch-alls in place that keep a doctor who screwed up from going to jail. Given the 80% chance of dying in the next 5 years or the 80% chance of being cured with an 20% chance of an operation done by a human still failing and killing me really fast I probably would still take my chances. It's always a trade-off and capable AIs driving for us or doing 95% of all medical diagnose work will tip the odds so far in favour of humans, playing the blame game if something at some point does go wrong would be nothing short of stupid and/or silly.
The same goes for "Whos the AI driven car going to kill? The the young handicapped kid on life support or the old grandma 5 years away from the grave but with 4 grandchildren who love her?".
This type of question entirely misses the point. AI will be let on to the streets when they drive way, way better than a human ever could, always and everywhere. Deaths in traffic will plummet by orders of magnitude and the occasional situation where an AI can't prevent someone from dying will be so rare society will shrug it off. Experts even expect an extreme organ donor shortage once AI hits the streets. Less idiots killing themselves and others. ... On second though, maybe we should keep a subset of roads for those who insist on racing around.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A real world exemple : electo-kardio-grams (traces of the heart activity).
They are a useful tool to help daignose heart rythm problems.
Since a couple of decade already, given how simple the data is (less than a dozen of 1D signals), we already have managed to do automatic recognition.
To the point that any modern EKG will give you a diagnostic printed after the traces them self on the report.
How do doctors use it ?
We are trained to first look at the traces, see if they seem obviously wrong or not,
then apply a couple of heuristics that we have learned (QT delay, signal elevation, etc) to check for everything,
and then read the automatic diagnostic.
So if we missed something, the automated diagnostic can help point us in the right direction (e.g.: if the pathology isn't that obvious).
But if we see something deeply wrong, we are not going to ignore it simply because the machine said "everything looks OK to me".
There's always going to be a doctor in the loop reviewing what the machines say, at least in the foreseeable future(*).
In a way you can think of the AI as a not yet fully trained early-year student: can give useful information, can offload some work to it. But never trust it 100% without a review.
---
(*): at least for as long as the current AI (based on deep neural nets) are only as good as training pigeons to guide WW2 bombs.
Perhaps if one day in the far distant future we manage to make much more clever AIs
(e.g.: a high number of various DNN, all interlinked together, the same way as a biological brain has several cortical regions, from primary (visual cortex), through some more associative (faces recognition), to highly associative (interlinking all the rest)).
Then it will be a question that boils to if this AI can manage to "pass exams".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The law tends to protect doctors from simple mistakes. And with AI I think the same would be true. If the software was diligently created and is known as a good product there is no expectation of perfection. The same is true for your surgeon. He can do great harm. But as long as he was sober, in a proper state of mind, and diligent in trying to render aid the law will not tend to land on him like a bag of bricks. Did the doctor or software do what other doctors or AI programs would have done? Is the bad outcome simply a matter of unusual conditions that do not diagnose easily? Juries know full well that a big settlement means their own individual health care prices will rise. A jury needs to feel rage in order to give a high award. If that doctor was in the strip club until 4 AM and drank a huge bottle of champaign and staggered into the operating room with no sleep and still half drunk then a jury very well may cut the string and let the red balloon fly.
...the variance with the diagnosis. The patient is fully and accurately informed. No liability.
Why do you assume that if something goes wrong that someone is to blame? That is a lawyer talking. If there is a misdiagnosis, it may simply be that we don't know enough to make a better one.
Have gnu, will travel.
Ok, ignore the cool factor of AI.
What happens if the Doctor consults a book, like Physician's Desk Reference, and follows the reccommended treatment. But the book had a mistake?
IMHO, whatever your answer for this is -- should be the same answer for the things they are calling AI nowadays. (if the AI gets free-will, human-rights, and equal citizenship, that's different -- then IT can be considered. But otherwise, it's all just tools for the doctor.)
My personally opinion, is that the responsibility is where it always has been -- on the doctor AND on the patient.
Please feel free to disagree....
Your mother!
Obama. The answer is Obama. Thanks again, Obama!!
Sigh. This is just more people looking to identify upon whom they can exact revenge if an error occurs.
Look, people, you're acting like psychos /and/ driving up the cost of healthcare at the same time, while slowing progress.
The AI's should be pre-certified by a standards body for being written as carefully as possible. If they are competently certified and you're in the false-positive or false-negative zones, that's just a natural consequence of participating in the medical care system.
Healthcare will /never/ be perfect. There will always be errors; information theory guarantees it. If the expected outcome of such an error is to seek vengeance, all that will do is to forestall the very innovation that will minimize those very errors. Do not participate in the system if you cannot value the risk rate in the system over the risk rate out of the system.
Some might wonder, "does it seem just to seek vengeance on the people who are causing that delay with their vengeance?" Everybody would do well to remember: âoeIf we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be a blind and toothless nation.â - MLKJr.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Shit happens. If you want to blame someone, blame God. You aren't entitled to compensation every time something bad happens.
You have to hold a license in order to practice medicine.
Same as any other professional license, except crappy doctors usually kill their victims one-by-one; crappy civil engineers can kill orders of magnitude more people in one disaster. This ain't anything new, folks.
You have certain ethical responsibilities when you get your MD, DO, DDS, etc--it's spelled out and regulated (in the us) by state.
Yes, it's really the state medical board they get their authority by statute.
It doesn't matter *what* diagnostic tools you're using--if you're practicing medicine, you're the gatekeeper.
The FDA will tell you what's approved or not approved--but they do not regulate *everything*.
Your employer makes you use some cheapass screening tool to grind a hundred patients through diagnosis where you'd only get ten of them through if you did it right. Fine--they have profit to think of.
It's your responsibility as the practicioner to say "No, this is bad medicine and I won't do it."
It's really a no-brainer for the practicioner, too--you're going to lose your license and get sued if you go along with this kind of crap.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Bayesian Nets, can incorporate expert knowledge, and they allow for parameter and structure machine learning.
The have been extensively used for diagnostics, and they give a valid statistics for the most probable diagnostic, based on the data that they have been trained with.
This kind of AI is computationally and conceptually somewhat more expensive, but there is really no valid reason why medical diagnostic systems shouldn't follow this paradigm. Especially since recent research shows that these networks are also surprisingly robust with regards to their parameter settings.
Some decisions are too important to just entrust to an ANN black box. In Bioinformatics it amounts to programming malpractice.
https://radiotherapydictionary...
First and foremost this is NOT Artificial Intelligence. It's machine learning and neural networks. Those are very different things. It's just that calling it machine learning isn't as attention grabbing and fear mongering as implying that these are intelligent systems.
The article does briefly correlate the two when stating that the opacity of machine learning makes the results almost impossible to trace back. That's a big consideration. I don't feel like looking up the article where a major hospital used their entire medical record database to feed the neural network and found that the system was significantly better at diagnosing schizophrenia. The problem is they don't know how the system does this, what indicators are being used, etc. But they've used this information to assist doctors in treating patients.
The way to go at the moment is to let these systems run and learn but give the results to real, trained doctors for diagnosis and treatment. Consider them another screening test. When the doctors have entered their diagnosis and treatment, plus how well the patient responded, the systems will learn a bit more. It's going to take a lot of years and a lot of medical records for these to become even marginally trusted. That doesn't mean they can't be fired up and start crunching the data now.