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Can AI Replace Hospital Radiologists? (cnn.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the algorithm-will-see-you-now dept.

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.

4 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. An AI isn't smart by itself. by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Interesting

    An AI is only as good as the people that have taught it. Of course it can accumulate experience and never forget, but humans also have a thing called intuition to see things in a different view and capture things that are completely new.

    Humans and AI will however supplement each other for improved accuracy.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    1. Re:An AI isn't smart by itself. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      An AI is only as good as the people that have taught it.

      Humans don't "teach" it. It learns directly from raw data.

      humans also have a thing called intuition

      That was also used to explain why computers couldn't play chess or Go as well as humans. Intuition is just pattern recognition.

      Humans and AI will however supplement each other for improved accuracy.

      It will start out that way. But later, humans will be removed from the process when it is clear that they just add cost, delay, and errors.

    2. Re:An AI isn't smart by itself. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Emergencies are even more reason to have a computer do the reading. The computer works 24/7, with at least 99% uptime. The human? Not so much. I work with radiologists. They're wonderfully trained. But they can only know so much, make mistakes, and want to go home to their families. They ignore or don't hear their pagers sometimes. Computers don't.

    3. Re:An AI isn't smart by itself. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not so much anymore. Unsupervised pretraining lets the machine learn from unlabelled data. Most of the labels actually come from the followup. Did that patient have a brain tumor? You don't ask the radiologist, you ask the pathologist.