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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.
Image recognition is not AI. Sorry.
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.
Don't worry. I recently had a chance to talk to some Watson people from IBM, and while they see excellent potential for supporting experts in diverse fields, the answer as to replacing experts was "not in the next 50 years". That is pretty extreme, as they really know what the state-of-the-art is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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