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Google DeepMind's AI Beats Doctors at Spotting Eye Disease in Scan (cnet.com)
DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence business, is planning clinical trials of technology that can help diagnose eye disease by analyzing medical images after early tests showed its results were more accurate than human doctors. From a report: Published in the scientific journal Nature, the study claims that DeepMind, in partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, has trained its algorithms to detect over 50 sight-threatening conditions to the same accuracy as expert clinicians. It is also capable of correctly recommending the most appropriate course of action for patients and prioritise those in most urgent need of care. In a project that began two years ago, DeepMind trained its machine learning algorithms using thousands of historic and fully anonymized eye scans to identify diseases that could lead to sight loss. According to the study, they can now do so with 94 percent accuracy, and the hope is that they could eventually be used to transform how eye exams are conducted around the world. You might be wondering why we need AI to do this job that has up until now been carried out by medical staff. But diagnosing eye diseases from ocular scans is incredibly time-consuming for doctors due to their complexity. Due to the aging global population, eye disease is also becoming more prevalent not less, increasing the burden on healthcare systems.
But it's great.
Well it is good, but more so that our level of healthcare can improve without ever more skyrocketing costs. With an aging population and a nearly never-ending supply of new drugs and treatments, we could probably automate 50% of the medical industry and still have a shortage of doctors. Every time we can move a diagnostic test from requiring 30 minutes of a doctor's time to 30 seconds of a computer's time, that is huge savings.
These stories are often spun as computers taking over a doctor's job, when they really should be thought of as productivity enhancements. The more we can move doctors to more complex work like designing treatment plans which work with a patient's lifestyle, the better we can use their very valuable time.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
If it's hard for a human to see whether the scan shows signs of a disease waiting to happen, what was the AI trained by? And by whom? Do we know that the eye scans are actually relevant to the diseases? This is the part that always strikes me odd in those "humans have a hard time to notice X, so we train an AI to do it" stories. If humans have a hard time telling whether something is or is not relevant to a certain disease, and if the AI can only be trained by humans because there is no other source of information available...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You think adding expensive technology on top of the doctors that are there will decrease costs?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The main reason health care costs more now than in 1950 (age-adjusted) is all the new technology. MRIs still aren't anything like cheap. What people with a political agenda tend to gloss over is that you get much better care now, thanks to that tech.
More accurate diagnostics are a net win, but don't expect costs to come down.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
London so they have NHS unlike us where under the GOP system this can be used to quickly black list people.
Sure - the NHS just blacklists you for being overweight or a smoker. It's a cheaper blacklisting system that avoids the costs of fancy US tests.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Doctors are blind, but not because they can't see. They are blinded by their conflict of interest between patient care and controlling costs. This conflict of interest is never disclosed to patients, but is very real. A doctor will never tell you "hey I think you might have pre-cancerous cells, but I'm not going to order the test because it costs $2000 and it may very well not be pre-cancer. We'll just wait and see if an actual tumor develops," but 99 times out of 100, if a doctor doesn't order a test for something, this is exactly the reasoning.
My wife of 37 years died from cervical cancer that started as precancerous cells in her cervix that were detected but never acted upon by her physician. The doctor wanted to wait another 6 months before running any tests on it because, she said, the cells were not conclusively abnormal.
In the trial, the emails I had subpoenaed showed that the cells were in fact a high grade pre-cancerous legion, but an email from the insurance company instructed the doctor to put off further testing or a LEEP procedure because they were way over that quarters expenditure numbers and that it could probably wait 6 months without issue. I will never forget that email, "these things can always wait 6 more months."
Well, those six months cost her her life, cost me my wife, and cost our children their mother.
I am all for replacing doctors with machines and AI, so long as insurance companies are never allowed to tinker with the algorithms. Let's face it though, they will figure out a way.
Don't wait for a greedy insurance company to murder a family member to demand change. We need a medical system that puts health first.
That is messed up. I hope you publicize this more and make more people aware of what happened.
I've had this opposite experience though. I went to the doctor for a routine checkup and ended up doing 3 tests for no reason. Chest X-ray, EEG and some blood work that I was charged for. They were not expensive tests but there was no reason for any of the tests. I even overheard one of the nurses look at my insurance details and say something giddily about deductibles.
we could probably automate 50% of the medical industry and still have a shortage of doctors.
That's a nice little made up statistic you have there. First off a lot of potential automation is refused by patients. They WANT a person to come in and talk to them about what they are experiencing and there is no way to automate this. Second, automation is only cheaper if you can do it in volume. Small medical practices don't have the money for expensive test equipment. There is a reason hospitals have the MRI machine and not your family doctor. This is neither good nor bad but just a reality of automation. Third, the cost overruns in the US medical industry have very little to do with automation and have a LOT to do with our ludicrous payment and management system. Fourth, the US medical system is actually relatively advanced when it comes to automation because there is money to be had by automating. If anything we have cost overruns because we have too much automation when we don't actually need it. Too much automation adds cost just like not enough does.
Every time we can move a diagnostic test from requiring 30 minutes of a doctor's time to 30 seconds of a computer's time, that is huge savings.
While it is true that any time savings is likely a cost savings, I think you may not appreciate how short a time doctors usually spend on a single case. My wife is a pathologist so I see some of this up close. I've seen pathologist go through 100 to as many as 300 cases in a single 8-12 hour shift. And for non-routine cases a computer likely wouldn't help shorten things very much. The actual diagnosis time is actually quite short - usually seconds to minutes. A lot of lab work is already highly automated. It's the gathering and compiling of all the data to do the tests and render diagnosis that usually takes the majority of the time and cost and labor. In my wife's job cases have to be accessioned, go through gross dissection, tissue preparation, histology and then finally looked at by the doctor. The doctor's percent of the time spent might be 5-10% of the total time spent. (I'm not even talking about the clinical time to take the tissue sample, transport it to the lab, and the paperwork and billing) Each of those steps has a person involved. The costs aren't the doctor's time but the legion of support staff needed to manage the equipment and paperwork.
These stories are often spun as computers taking over a doctor's job, when they really should be thought of as productivity enhancements.
You know who isn't worried about them? Doctors. You are quite right that they aren't and likely cannot be replacements for doctors. Much like the PC on your desk they are just tools to make them better at their job. And that's a good thing if we use them right.
Unless one company has a monopoly through patents or private data.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Oh, administrative costs (and insurance company profits, in the US) may be as much as 1/3rd of overall health care costs, and that sucks. But health care cost has gone up vastly more than 30%, inflation adjusted, in the past 60 years.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You think adding expensive technology on top of the doctors that are there will decrease costs?
Yes, I think software capable of detecting sight threatening conditions would reduce the cost of preventative eye care. I believe the cost per scan will be less than the cost of having an optometrist do it. Doctors are very expensive.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The main reason health care costs more now than in 1950 (age-adjusted) is all the new technology. MRIs still aren't anything like cheap. What people with a political agenda tend to gloss over is that you get much better care now, thanks to that tech.
More accurate diagnostics are a net win, but don't expect costs to come down.
MRIs increase overall healthcare costs because it provides a service which couldn't even be done without the technology. It creates a net new cost (but also improves care). Using software to replace humans providing an existing service is very different, and has a high likelihood of reducing costs. If rules are created were this software can only be used to confirm existing diagnosis then it would be considered a net new service, and would increase costs.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Google beats doctor... but your doctor won't share your data with companies all over the web and start advertising to you based on what condition it discovers and trying to take advantage of you financially based on what ails you. (they will just milk you a bunch for your visit instead).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You can hide the automation from the patient.
Sometimes though not always. And you can't hide the fact that the doctor isn't there talking to them.
They can spend the time they would normally use to do so doing something else productive if the computer does it.
I guess I'm not making my point clear. The opportunity for time savings isn't generally in diagnosis. That's rather efficient in quite a lot of cases. It's on the administrative side of things that is where the real time burden is and where the opportunity for automation really stands out. Digital medical records, more efficient billing, reducing the need for office staff, etc. If we can improve treatment for reasonable costs by all means but we're not really saving doctor's time by making a diagnosis that used to take 2 minutes take 1. What would really help is to help them eliminate the time they spend on paperwork which is often several multiples of the time they spend actively taking care of patients (including diagnosis).
I agree that it would be nice to see the actual numbers, but they said it performs better than human doctors. So I doubt it is a black box you described it could be.
This is the downside of making docs the gatekeepers for the things patients really need: A LOT of docs make a significant portion of their income from referrals for labs, imaging, prescriptions, etc. Straight kickbacks, of course, are illegal, but there are all kinds of investment groups, etc. that are used to get around these, and it's not uncommon at all for docs in the US to get connected with one of these groups and make tens of thousands of dollars a month (and I've seen reports listing almost a million/mo!) *just* for their referrals.
Healthcare costs in the US can NEVER be fixed until we kill the FDA/AMA complex, which enshrines the physician as the all-purpose gatekeeper. Why can't I just straight-up *buy* the things I need w/o having to go through my Doc first? More and more people *want* to take responsibility for their own treatment - we should be enabling them. (I know my position is radical, but I agree with Milton Freidman that we should have no occupational licensing, not even for physicians. Given the large and repeated failures we've had over the years, it's clear that licensing is no guarantee of safety or competence...
At the moment, for instance, I'd just like to drop $20 for a quick prescription update from an eye-scanner machines - that could be a good business for somebody, if it weren't for the doc lobby making sure I can't do that w/o paying for a $100-150 doctor's visit. (Thanks to Obamacare, I now have no insurance, and have to pay everything out of pocket, which means I pay several times what the insurance companies pay, but at least I'm not paying for things I don't need and won't use...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
A few days after this post, IBM shows low promise of success using AI for medical diagnostic. Why such contrast?
Doctors spend about 30 seconds looking at such things. Not much cost there to reduce.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Doctors spend about 30 seconds looking at such things. Not much cost there to reduce.
I am not sure that is true, since TFA says "diagnosing eye diseases from ocular scans is complex and time-consuming for doctors". Perhaps ocular scans are far more complex than most MRI/CT scans, but in my experience it can take days to get results from some MRI scans so I doubt it is a 30 second process.
Then again, there are over 100 million MRI/CT scans performed per year in the US alone, so even 30 seconds saved would be 50 million man-hours of doctors' time saved. That's probably worth around $100 million yearly right there. But if I'm right and it is more like a few minutes of time saved per scan, it could easily be over $500 million in yearly savings, in the USA alone. If we are both wrong and it actually saves 10+ minutes per scan, the savings are into the billions.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke