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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.
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.
And now one medical imaging startup can read a heart MRI in 15 seconds, a procedure which takes a human 45 minutes.
That's quite nice that you save 44.75 minutes, but isn't kind of more interesting how much money you save? Save for emergency situations, waiting an hour usually isn't a problem in US medicine. Even 45 minutes of CPU/GPU time is going to be cheaper than 45 minutes of human time.
Ezekiel 23:20
flagging images that humans should examine more closely
That's exactly how it's going to work. You could train a 5 year old to determine if an image showed scenario A or B. It's just fancy chicken sexing. Anything that is decisively A or B gets labeled as such. Images that are questionable get passed on to Level 2, the Human.
Then you re-train the network, rinse repeat.
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.
Dermatologists are looking towards extinction as well.
BTW, as a physician who spends half his day in the hospital and half in the office, I average speaking to a radiologist about once a year.
You could replace all the radiologists (excepting interventional radiologists) in the U.S. with IBM's Watson and a dozen humans for over-reads. You don't go into radiology if you're a people person.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
.. while leaving radiologists with more time for interacting with patients and medical staff.
It will leave more time for radiologists to review additional flagged scans since that will probably make them the most money.
Can we teach editors Betteridge's law of headlines?
Re:Can AI replace Slashdot editors?
How could you possibly train an AI to be that stupid?
I'd at least want a second opinion.
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Image recognition is not AI. Sorry.
No, AI can not.
Most of the world didn't think that the automobile would replace horse + carriage when first introduced.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
If new tools allow a person to handle twice or even ten times the case load, you've effectively replaced people with A.I.
Only if the number of tasks to perform remains constant. Currently radiologists are a bottleneck that constrains the use of medical imagery. With the easing of this bottleneck through productivity, and the lowering costs of the technology, medical imagery is likely to be used far more than it currently is. Therefore the need for radiologists remains.
I think most routine radiology could end up at least being assisted by AI, given that the entire practice revolves around using imaging techniques that return incomplete data and making a judgement call. This is the sort of thing machine learning is good at -- reading billions of images and determining what something looks like. Real radiologists in training do the same thing -- except they have a much smaller data set to fall back on.
The real question is how we're going to deal with the sudden flip in what is considered a highly-skilled job:
- Doctors in general are a perfect example - because the supply of medical school slots is kept low, only the people with perfect grades and photographic memories, _and_ who can ace the MCAT get into med school (in the US.) If machine learning becomes a thing, then having a photographic memory is not going to be as important as it once was...it's already less important.
- The Bar Association didn't limit the amount of law school slots the way the AMA does, and the result today is that law school grads can't find work. Just 20 years ago, having a law degree would definitely get you a job, and having a Top 14 law degree would set you up for life permanently. Law is a profession that relies on interpreting vast amounts of data, and computers are really good at the routine parts of the job that junior associates used to make $180K a year doing.
- From the non-professions, another example is air traffic controllers. Even with computers aiding them, humans who have the unique ability to think natively in 3 dimensions and keep an entire sector of airspace's inhabitants in their brains along with their speed, altitude and heading have been doing it for ages. It takes years of training to understand and definitely qualifies in my book as a highly skilled job. They make a lot of money because few people have the ability to do it and keep their stress levels non-lethal. But, it also sounds like something computers could take over eventually.
And nobody honest claims that they can. For example, the Watson people from IBM say "will not replace experts in the next 50 years". The state of the art in AI gets massively overestimated all the time. Actual fact is that the only thing available is "weak AI", and that one does not have any actual intelligence and is restricted to library look-up and statistical classificators. Very useful, but not even remotely doing what a smart and experienced human being can do. These algorithms do not have insight or understanding and they cannot get it. It is not a question of computing power either.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Geoff Hinton said that machine learning and particularly deep learning is so good now that anything that amounts to classification will soon be done better by machines than humans. The except is here. So logically medical schools should stop churning out radiologists now.
I would like to agree with him, but note that there is still a large difference between even large synthetic tests and the real world. At the end of the day a trained medical specialist will have to make the diagnosis, machines are not there yet, and companies are not willing to risk this level of commitment. Compare it to self-driving cars if you want: it may be technically doable, but the practical and legal challenges are still enormous.
I should say that I have been working in automating medical imaging for more than 20 years now. 15 years ago, with others I demonstrated a system that diagnosed skin cancer better than humans, and won many awards for it. Nonetheless it was not a commercial success and our company folded. Maybe things will be different because larger companies are behind similar efforts now (like IBM) and they have the time, resources and money to make it happen. However make no mistake, getting these systems accepted is going to take a long time.
So I would suggest that rather than saying inflammatory things that sound like "we CS people do things better than you petty doctors", AI people should propose to work with medical schools to help train specialists to understand, use these systems correctly and benefit from them. Any other attitude is probably doomed to fail.
Actually difficult image-based problems is where AI will excel, give time and good training data. However a kind of medical "expert system" is not exactly in sight yet. So I basically agree with you: AI will be an excellent tool, boosting productivity and driving costs down. I am not sure it will drive the number of doctors down.
No, who are you going to sue. Will never happen.
"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
A simple "Hello World" script could replace Slashdot editors.
I'm a radiologist. In the UK, I'm in massive demand, as approximately 25% of positions are vacant; and that's only the ones which have been advertised, there are many more where hospital managers haven't even created a vacancy because they know there is no chance of filling it.
What has happened instead is that radiology techs now do a lot of the jobs; like ultrasound scanning and reporting, protocolling and reporting CT scans, protocolling MRI, performing minor interventional procedures like central line insertion, lymph node biopsy or lumbar puncture.
This way, the simpler stuff is done by the techs, whereas the radiologists do the more difficult stuff - reporting the advanced CT, reporting MRI, performing complex intervention.
In some ways, this is a good thing - as it keeps costs down (it costs approx $100 per hour to employ a radiologist, or approx $50 per hour to employ a rad tech) and mitigates recruitment problems. However, it brings other issues; the rad techs are not medically trained, so can typically only report very limited indications and can't provide medical advice; reporting or interventional rad techs tend only to be trained in one area, radiologists have general training even if they subsequently subspecialise - this means rad techs may not be able to handle the ER work, other than the basic arm/leg radiographs for bone fractures.
For a modern radiologist who spends their time doing only the difficult stuff; they have little to worry from AI for the forseeable future. It's the rad techs who are nibbling at the basic level stuff who are going to be replaced, and replaced relatively quickly
There will always be things that the AI will miss.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Siri, do you concur with Watson?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Programmers should have a duty of social responsibility
to not develop AI which will eventually replace any worker.
The easiest person to replace is an AI developer.
Go well
In medicine Radiology appears to be the hi tech thing everyone except the patient or radiologist want to automate/eliminate. Sure radiologists are expensive, and hospital admins hate them for their costs, but it's still going to be awhile before they are replaced. It's not about identifying the problems, but preventing false positives. AI algos are good at the former, not the latter.
But of course, radiology is heavy image based, so all our computer vision and machine learning CS folks want to completely solve "the problem", aka automation, instead of complimenting the actual user (radiologist).
i was thinking maybe something along the lines of if then else
I hope so, they miss things too often. I have a weird congenital defect in my leg that can lead to blood clots later on in life. Only one radiologist ever picked up on the defect,even though it is really easy to see.
Obviously AI can replace radiologists. If new tools allow a person to handle twice or even ten times the case load, you've effectively replaced people with A.I.
Radiology can turn into a call center job as well, where a small team of people handle departments at multiple hospitals and medical centers. Imagine a world where a staff of 3-4 handles every case for 100 locations. Easily means 1000s of cases per day, but with A.I. it is conceivable.
Idiots think A.I. replacing a job means the original job no longer exists. That is a naÃve postion to take.
It is already a call-center job. You still have a tech who wheels you into the machine,
administers contrast dyes or whatever, and pushes the buttons. But the scan (e.g. X-Ray)
is read by some radiologist sitting in a lab or call-center or their home. They are being
fed many, many images over the Internet to their laptop. They are given a certain amount
of time to read the image and return a diagnosis. They are overworked and treated like
a machine already, generally feeling that the allotted time is too small, the workload is
too high, and somewhat terrified that they will make a mistake under these conditions.
When this system is replaced by AI, only the difficult scans that the machine wasn't sure
about will be sent to the doctors. Whether they will still be overworked and about to
accidentally kill you is an open question.