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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.
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.
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.