5 ms·

A few decades from now, 30 - 50 years at most, doctors and patients, will look back at us and wonder, why we were not using algorithms to assist with diagnosis

by shiven 10y ago

A few decades from now, 30 - 50 years at most, doctors and patients, will look back at us and wonder, why we were not using algorithms to assist with diagnosis already.

Nadya 10y ago
As with many things - fear that the AI will be wrong (no matter how less frequently this happens than with doctors) and a desire for a human to blame if there is a mistake. If a doctor makes a misdiagnosis and kills the patient as a result it is less bad than if an AI makes a misdiagnosis and kills the patient as a result. It's the one thing I don't understand about most of society. Same with self driving cars. Self driving cars could be proven to be 100,000% safer than human drivers - but until it is legally mandated people will prefer humans behind the wheel because "what if the self driving car runs a red light and kills someone?" ignoring the hundreds and thousands of humans who run red lights and kill people. >why we were not using algorithms to assist with diagnosis already. On the bright side - we increasingly are! I think it's more an issue with budgeting and legal issues that it isn't as widespread.
- MR4D 10y ago
  With medical issues, I'd expect there would be a point at which computers are so much more accurate that humans wouldn't be able to tell. An analogy is instant replay in football. There are some plays that are just so close, that they can't overrule the field judge - and wouldn't be able to even if the field judge made the opposite ruling! That being said, you're betting on humans to be irrational, and that is always a good bet unfortunately.
- jdonaldson 10y ago
  I believe you're right about the blame issues. I came here to post about that. One other wrinkle... Having an algorithm strictly following rules and procedures to the T means that we're taking moral/human decision making out of the mix. This matters in situations where two different diagnoses may have the same treatment, but different outcomes on the patient's livelihood aside from their health. E.g., a human doctor may note that a tumor is just big enough to be considered cancerous, but marks it down as "pre-cancerous" in their official diagnosis. The treatment is still the same, but it keeps the more serious diagnosis off the patient's record, which can help them when dealing with insurance. One follow-up argument to this may be that humans would have the final say in a given diagnosis, but I bet this wouldn't always be the case, particularly in lower income scenarios. The final question to me is if the risk of the loss of moral agency outweighs the risk for incorrect diagnosis. I think there's going to be variance in the machine/human accuracy rates, and the need for a deeper understanding of the human condition.
- a_imho 10y ago
  Apples and oranges. We do have driving assistance, fully autonomous vehicles are entirely different. Low hanging fruits are being picked, not wanting a software to call the shots every time is a valid stand imo.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    I think aviation is a good analogy. Most of the automation in a modern airliner, for example, isn't there to make the plane "fly itself" from point A to point B -- it's there to do things machines are good at in order to reduce the workload of the human crew, so they have more time/energy to focus on the things humans are good at. Flight plans, for example, are still decided on by humans, even if a programmed computer carries out many aspects of the plan once decided upon. Same for en-route deviation from the prior plan in order to either avoid bad weather or reach good weather (where "weather" is kind of a broad term, and includes things like winds which would help/hinder an airliner). Although "autoland" is a feature, it's not something that's used every time and can be moderately complex to set up, since a bunch of factors have to be decided/input by a human. And of course the final decision to land or go around is made by a human. Which drives home the fact that automation, in aviation, is a partnership between humans and machines, with humans benefiting and being more productive from offloading some work. A lot of fields should be looking at that as a model.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      And yet there are cases where humans interfering with the automation caused a crash.
      - ubernostrum 10y ago
        Yes, humans refusing to trust or work with the automation can cause a disaster. That's not an argument for going fully automated or fully human, it's an argument for developing better cooperation between the humans and the automation.
        10y ago
- bike4beer 10y ago
  A major failure of USA medicine is the legal system, where a DOC if a fails is subject to a mal-practice lawsuit. Frequently if a doctor say makes $300k/year, its not unheard of him having to pay $150k/year premium for mal-practice. Ok, now here's the problem, he fails regularly, whoops I killed a patient, and the surviving family get's paid, lawyers get paid, the system moves on. Where I live, and I can speak for most of ASIA, if a doctor kills a patient, most certainly the family will kill that doctor, now surprisingly mal-practice is RARE, imagine that???? IMHO one BIG reason why USA medicine is such a mess is that the lawyers ( insurance ) have created this fault-free mess where tired doctors do frequently make mistakes and infect, kill, or mis-diagnose their patients. The system largely gives them a big mea-culpa, its all part of doing business. Given we're now on robots and diagnostic sw, certainly the issue in the USA will be WHO pay's?? IMHO once again our system revolves around going after the 'deepest pockets'; There is no simple solution to the USA way of doing things, thankfully bankruptcy is coming, and out of the ashes the USA will once again learn about self-treatment, and cheap-drugs, just like was done pre 1910, before Rockefeller (big oil ) created the AMA and decided to take over health-care, you know make opium and pot illegal, which had been used by granny forever for stomach-aches, ....
- wnkrshm 10y ago
  Maybe it's not so much that a human isn't to blame in the case of an algorithm classifying something incorrectly, but that an algorithm might make mistakes that a human wouldn't. I've read a very interesting article [0] about autonomous driving recently, a discussion about the ethics and social obstacles in the way of adopting autonomous cars. The author makes the case that while algorithms might perform a task safer than humans in total but they will inevitably make mistakes. And those mistakes may well be mistakes that are trivial for a human to prevent. Algorithms making lethal mistakes that a human professional will be extremely unlikely to make, will be the hardest part to swallow if we adopt automation in critical roles - even if the total amount of deaths can be reduced that way. Even if they are safe across the board, statistically proving to people that autonomous machines perform correctly and aren't prone to obvious mistakes would take decades and billions of hours of operation to be able to make a statement about their safety relative to human performance - since lethal accidents due to human error are relatively rare events. So we are faced with a hen and egg problem in that regard. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/tesla-autopilot-crash-why-we-should-worry-about-a-single-death http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...
notfour 10y ago
If you take surgeons, they are trained for one thing. I know a bariatric surgeon who is an expert in medical weight loss but he could not define the word ketogenic. He told me I was foolish for going on a high fat diet (despite the fact that he's overweight). Also my oncologist didn't know if some vitamins could actually help my cancer and he was skeptical that my diet could effect my IGF1 levels. He couldn't tell me how I got cancer and couldn't tell me any way to prevent it. It makes me think there's a future potential problem of Establishment AIs vs contrarian AIs? How would it determine what is best with contradictory information?
- QSIITurbo 10y ago
  Both your doctors were correct: high fat diet is unhealthy and vitamins don't help cancer (unless you mean help it grow).
- na85 10y ago
  It's almost like our understanding of cancer is incomplete.
drmindmachine 10y ago
For sure. In 15 years or so, we will wonder why we ALLOWED humans to drive vehicles.
- narrowrail 10y ago
  Human liberty is the default, so we'd have to opt-out of it, which I will never support. Humans will still do the majority driving in 20 years.
  - drmindmachine 10y ago
    You may not have the choice in future. When was last time you chose primary functions in indiv auto? Billionaires excluded. Custom tertiary features humans may choose, yes...but primary functions no. Ahhh and freedom from mundane/routine and headaches in traffic may TRUMP (haha) freedom to choose (your type of liberty) I theorize. 77M Millennials would also welcome freedom from driving. Plus 75M Baby Boomers would if not welcome the freedom may be forced to give it up...due to health/aging. GenX'rs - at least sample of 1, moi, - would love the ability to do other things while being driven. And I drive the "ultimate driving machine." https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unsafe-any-speed-humans-gisele-waters-ph-d- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unsafe-any-speed-humans-gisel... 20 years too long in my predictions, mostly due to convergence of demographic realities and exponential advances in AI self driving.

by shiven 10y ago

A few decades from now, 30 - 50 years at most, doctors and patients, will look back at us and wonder, why we were not using algorithms to assist with diagnosis already.

Nadya 10y ago

As with many things - fear that the AI will be wrong (no matter how less frequently this happens than with doctors) and a desire for a human to blame if there is a mistake. If a doctor makes a misdiagnosis and kills the patient as a result it is less bad than if an AI makes a misdiagnosis and kills the patient as a result. It's the one thing I don't understand about most of society. Same with self driving cars. Self driving cars could be proven to be 100,000% safer than human drivers - but until it is legally mandated people will prefer humans behind the wheel because "what if the self driving car runs a red light and kills someone?" ignoring the hundreds and thousands of humans who run red lights and kill people. >why we were not using algorithms to assist with diagnosis already. On the bright side - we increasingly are! I think it's more an issue with budgeting and legal issues that it isn't as widespread.

MR4D 10y ago
With medical issues, I'd expect there would be a point at which computers are so much more accurate that humans wouldn't be able to tell. An analogy is instant replay in football. There are some plays that are just so close, that they can't overrule the field judge - and wouldn't be able to even if the field judge made the opposite ruling! That being said, you're betting on humans to be irrational, and that is always a good bet unfortunately.
jdonaldson 10y ago
I believe you're right about the blame issues. I came here to post about that. One other wrinkle... Having an algorithm strictly following rules and procedures to the T means that we're taking moral/human decision making out of the mix. This matters in situations where two different diagnoses may have the same treatment, but different outcomes on the patient's livelihood aside from their health. E.g., a human doctor may note that a tumor is just big enough to be considered cancerous, but marks it down as "pre-cancerous" in their official diagnosis. The treatment is still the same, but it keeps the more serious diagnosis off the patient's record, which can help them when dealing with insurance. One follow-up argument to this may be that humans would have the final say in a given diagnosis, but I bet this wouldn't always be the case, particularly in lower income scenarios. The final question to me is if the risk of the loss of moral agency outweighs the risk for incorrect diagnosis. I think there's going to be variance in the machine/human accuracy rates, and the need for a deeper understanding of the human condition.
a_imho 10y ago
Apples and oranges. We do have driving assistance, fully autonomous vehicles are entirely different. Low hanging fruits are being picked, not wanting a software to call the shots every time is a valid stand imo.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  I think aviation is a good analogy. Most of the automation in a modern airliner, for example, isn't there to make the plane "fly itself" from point A to point B -- it's there to do things machines are good at in order to reduce the workload of the human crew, so they have more time/energy to focus on the things humans are good at. Flight plans, for example, are still decided on by humans, even if a programmed computer carries out many aspects of the plan once decided upon. Same for en-route deviation from the prior plan in order to either avoid bad weather or reach good weather (where "weather" is kind of a broad term, and includes things like winds which would help/hinder an airliner). Although "autoland" is a feature, it's not something that's used every time and can be moderately complex to set up, since a bunch of factors have to be decided/input by a human. And of course the final decision to land or go around is made by a human. Which drives home the fact that automation, in aviation, is a partnership between humans and machines, with humans benefiting and being more productive from offloading some work. A lot of fields should be looking at that as a model.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    And yet there are cases where humans interfering with the automation caused a crash.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      Yes, humans refusing to trust or work with the automation can cause a disaster. That's not an argument for going fully automated or fully human, it's an argument for developing better cooperation between the humans and the automation.
      - 10y ago
bike4beer 10y ago
A major failure of USA medicine is the legal system, where a DOC if a fails is subject to a mal-practice lawsuit. Frequently if a doctor say makes $300k/year, its not unheard of him having to pay $150k/year premium for mal-practice. Ok, now here's the problem, he fails regularly, whoops I killed a patient, and the surviving family get's paid, lawyers get paid, the system moves on. Where I live, and I can speak for most of ASIA, if a doctor kills a patient, most certainly the family will kill that doctor, now surprisingly mal-practice is RARE, imagine that???? IMHO one BIG reason why USA medicine is such a mess is that the lawyers ( insurance ) have created this fault-free mess where tired doctors do frequently make mistakes and infect, kill, or mis-diagnose their patients. The system largely gives them a big mea-culpa, its all part of doing business. Given we're now on robots and diagnostic sw, certainly the issue in the USA will be WHO pay's?? IMHO once again our system revolves around going after the 'deepest pockets'; There is no simple solution to the USA way of doing things, thankfully bankruptcy is coming, and out of the ashes the USA will once again learn about self-treatment, and cheap-drugs, just like was done pre 1910, before Rockefeller (big oil ) created the AMA and decided to take over health-care, you know make opium and pot illegal, which had been used by granny forever for stomach-aches, ....
wnkrshm 10y ago
Maybe it's not so much that a human isn't to blame in the case of an algorithm classifying something incorrectly, but that an algorithm might make mistakes that a human wouldn't. I've read a very interesting article [0] about autonomous driving recently, a discussion about the ethics and social obstacles in the way of adopting autonomous cars. The author makes the case that while algorithms might perform a task safer than humans in total but they will inevitably make mistakes. And those mistakes may well be mistakes that are trivial for a human to prevent. Algorithms making lethal mistakes that a human professional will be extremely unlikely to make, will be the hardest part to swallow if we adopt automation in critical roles - even if the total amount of deaths can be reduced that way. Even if they are safe across the board, statistically proving to people that autonomous machines perform correctly and aren't prone to obvious mistakes would take decades and billions of hours of operation to be able to make a statement about their safety relative to human performance - since lethal accidents due to human error are relatively rare events. So we are faced with a hen and egg problem in that regard. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/tesla-autopilot-crash-why-we-should-worry-about-a-single-death http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...

notfour 10y ago

If you take surgeons, they are trained for one thing. I know a bariatric surgeon who is an expert in medical weight loss but he could not define the word ketogenic. He told me I was foolish for going on a high fat diet (despite the fact that he's overweight). Also my oncologist didn't know if some vitamins could actually help my cancer and he was skeptical that my diet could effect my IGF1 levels. He couldn't tell me how I got cancer and couldn't tell me any way to prevent it. It makes me think there's a future potential problem of Establishment AIs vs contrarian AIs? How would it determine what is best with contradictory information?

QSIITurbo 10y ago
Both your doctors were correct: high fat diet is unhealthy and vitamins don't help cancer (unless you mean help it grow).
na85 10y ago
It's almost like our understanding of cancer is incomplete.

drmindmachine 10y ago

For sure. In 15 years or so, we will wonder why we ALLOWED humans to drive vehicles.

narrowrail 10y ago
Human liberty is the default, so we'd have to opt-out of it, which I will never support. Humans will still do the majority driving in 20 years.
- drmindmachine 10y ago
  You may not have the choice in future. When was last time you chose primary functions in indiv auto? Billionaires excluded. Custom tertiary features humans may choose, yes...but primary functions no. Ahhh and freedom from mundane/routine and headaches in traffic may TRUMP (haha) freedom to choose (your type of liberty) I theorize. 77M Millennials would also welcome freedom from driving. Plus 75M Baby Boomers would if not welcome the freedom may be forced to give it up...due to health/aging. GenX'rs - at least sample of 1, moi, - would love the ability to do other things while being driven. And I drive the "ultimate driving machine." https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unsafe-any-speed-humans-gisele-waters-ph-d- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unsafe-any-speed-humans-gisel... 20 years too long in my predictions, mostly due to convergence of demographic realities and exponential advances in AI self driving.