Chinese AI Beats 15 Doctors In Tumor Diagnosis Competition (thenextweb.com)

An artificial intelligence system called BioMind has managed to defeated a team comprised of 15 of China's top doctors by a margin of two to one. The Next Web reports the details: When diagnosing brain tumors, BioMind was correct 87 percent of the time, compared to 66 percent by the medical professionals. The AI also only took 15 minutes to diagnose the 225 cases, while doctors took 30. In regards to predicting brain hematoma expansion, BioMind was victorious again, as it was correct in 83 percent of cases, with humans managing only 63 percent. Researchers trained the AI by feeding it thousands upon thousands of images from Beijing Tiantan Hospital's archives. This has made it as good at diagnosing neurological diseases as senior doctors, as it has a 90 percent accuracy rate. Further reading available via Xinhua.

Comments

Impressive

[110010001000]

This is really amazing. It is like computers are good at image recognition. I see a lot of potential in this AI.

Re:Impressive

[sfcat]

This is really amazing. It is like computers are good at image recognition. I see a lot of potential in this AI.

Actually medical diagnosis was the first challenge AI succeed at...back in the 1970's. It wasn't until the late 90's that AI succeed at another major feat (beating the world champ at Chess). There really isn't anything surprising or impressive about this feat.

The problem with AI systems in medicine are the doctors who don't want to use the technology. Step into a hospital sometime and look at their computer systems which will often be older than what you can see in the computer museum. The second problem is insurance which doesn't really want the current system changed. The problem with utilizing this technology (which has existed in some form for 40 years already) is people, not the abilities of the technology.

More details would be nice

[scottragen]

Did the AI give any false positives?
Did the doctors correctly diagnose any cases that the AI did not?

Whilst this is great news, I hope doctors use it as a learning and aid tool instead of a full diagnosis suite without a review by the specialist.

Re:More details would be nice

[AmiMoJo]

The big problem with AI at the moment is that we don't understand how it makes decisions. You can ask a doctor why they made a certain diagnosis, but you can't ask an AI in many cases. So at best the AI result can prompt a human doctor to look again, but it can't give much in the way of hints as to why it disagrees with the human.

This is a huge problem and one which the EU has addressed with the GDPR, which gives you the right to know how decisions were made and on what grounds. That prevents companies simply telling you that "computer says no". If they want to use AIs for making decisions about you then the AI either needs to explain itself or they will have to have a human review anything you query.

AI as an invaluable support tool for doctors

[Camembert]

This is encouraging news. i had read previously of Watson helping doctors in diagnosing a baffling case of Leukemia that seemed totally untreatable, Watson correctly indicated that the patient had 2 kinds of Leukemia at once, which the human doctors didn’t realise.
Machine learning will not soon replace human doctors, I think, but you can see it becoming a powerful support tool for doctors, hopefully finding ailments earlier as well. Fascinating.

Humans...

[spongman]

...need not apply.

Re:Human right 100% of the time

[ShanghaiBill]

A probable tumor in a scan is often followed up with a biopsy or exploratory surgery for confirmation.