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Can AI Replace Hospital Radiologists? (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Radiologists, who receive years of training and are some of the highest paid doctors, are among the first physicians who will have to adapt as artificial intelligence expands into health care... Today radiologists face a deluge of data as they serve patients. When Jim Brink, radiologist in chief at Massachusetts General Hospital, entered the field in the late 1980s, radiologists had to examine 20 to 50 images for CT and PET scans. Now, there can be as many as 1,000 images for one scan. The work can be tedious, making it prone to error. The added imagery also makes it harder for radiologists to use their time efficiently... The remarkable power of today's computers has raised the question of whether humans should even act as radiologists. Geoffrey Hinton, a legend in the field of artificial intelligence, went so far as to suggest that schools should stop training radiologists.
X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds and PET scans do improve patient care -- but they also drive up costs. And now one medical imaging startup can read a heart MRI in 15 seconds, a procedure which takes a human 45 minutes. Massachusetts General Hospital is already assembling data to train algorithms to spot 25 common scenarios. But Brinks predicts that ultimately AI will become more of a sophisticated diagnostic aid, flagging images that humans should examine more closely, while leaving radiologists with more time for interacting with patients and medical staff.
X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ultrasounds and PET scans do improve patient care -- but they also drive up costs. And now one medical imaging startup can read a heart MRI in 15 seconds, a procedure which takes a human 45 minutes. Massachusetts General Hospital is already assembling data to train algorithms to spot 25 common scenarios. But Brinks predicts that ultimately AI will become more of a sophisticated diagnostic aid, flagging images that humans should examine more closely, while leaving radiologists with more time for interacting with patients and medical staff.
Can AI Replace Hospital Radiologists?
No, AI can not. What AI can do is be an extremely valuable tool for radiologists and doctors, one that makes analyzing all the various forms of synthetic medical imagery more accurate, and most likely increasing their productivity. It can reduce oversights and errors, but it won't be able to fully replace expert human analysis for quite some time. Like most AI solutions it will most likely take far longer than AI experts predict. Perhaps we need an AI to predict timeframe for AI solutions since people seem to do that poorly. :-)
Does this perhaps lead to reducing the number of radiologists due to increased productivity? Probably not, more likely radiologists will be bombarded with more imagery to analyze as technology improves and costs lower and is more frequently used.
No it learn from *annotated* data. That is data where a human, most probably a doctor, told the system what to look for. Good quality annotated data is scarce and expensive to get and that is the #1 problem in AI research.