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Most of the people that have been saying this for years have no idea how hospitals or health care in general functions. This includes the internal politics of a

Most of the people that have been saying this for years have no idea how hospitals or health care in general functions. This includes the internal politics of a hospital, politics of the health care system as a whole and patterns of medical care/practice. As a surgeon, I can assure you that Radiology is not going anywhere. If anything, ML/DL will augment and improve radiology outcomes by assisting radiologists but there is no way as of yet where any type of AI can perform the role of a radiologist- that is, take a radiologic study, correlate that with an often past medical/surgical history of a patient and provide valuable insight into what's going on with the patient. I'm not a pessimist about this at all. ML/DL will absolutely improve outcomes if implemented properly; however, radiologists are going to be augmented, not replaced. They are after all physicians.

m_ke 7y ago
That's how all sensible machine learning systems are deployed, as assistive tools with a human in the loop so that they can improve with usage. This stuff will be used to do initial screening to prioritize cases and provide an initial analysis for the radiologist to confirm. Once they're deployed it won't be too long before they're as good as the top practitioners. It will be a long time before they completely replace radiologists in America but we'll probably see them on autopilot in third world countries where there's a shortage of doctors and data privacy laws are not as stringent. I've met a Chinese guy doing medicine in the states who claimed to have access to all medical data for a bunch of hospitals back in China.
bearjaws 7y ago
Sure the politics of health systems will slow down implementation. However, I have seen many times in my career where technology has made peoples job titles more "scarce" as the efficiency gains of new medical software have decreased the time needed for people to do that job. Radiologists are likely to see a lower demand as a result of these technologies and will either A) Spend more time on complicated cases or B) Be let go. Nobody is saying ALL radiologists are going to be out a job. Look at dosimetry as a recent example of how software improved, and the time to contour per patient decreased, causing many health systems to shrink their dosimetrist staff or offload the responsibilities to the physician office. This isn't the first time technology has been applied to healthcare, change will come slowly and eventually people will have to find new fields to work within healthcare.

m_ke 7y ago

That's how all sensible machine learning systems are deployed, as assistive tools with a human in the loop so that they can improve with usage. This stuff will be used to do initial screening to prioritize cases and provide an initial analysis for the radiologist to confirm. Once they're deployed it won't be too long before they're as good as the top practitioners. It will be a long time before they completely replace radiologists in America but we'll probably see them on autopilot in third world countries where there's a shortage of doctors and data privacy laws are not as stringent. I've met a Chinese guy doing medicine in the states who claimed to have access to all medical data for a bunch of hospitals back in China.

bearjaws 7y ago

Sure the politics of health systems will slow down implementation. However, I have seen many times in my career where technology has made peoples job titles more "scarce" as the efficiency gains of new medical software have decreased the time needed for people to do that job. Radiologists are likely to see a lower demand as a result of these technologies and will either A) Spend more time on complicated cases or B) Be let go. Nobody is saying ALL radiologists are going to be out a job. Look at dosimetry as a recent example of how software improved, and the time to contour per patient decreased, causing many health systems to shrink their dosimetrist staff or offload the responsibilities to the physician office. This isn't the first time technology has been applied to healthcare, change will come slowly and eventually people will have to find new fields to work within healthcare.