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It is hard to overestimate just how scarce even the median human doctor competency is, at the global scale. If large language models indeed can give billions a
by sinenomine 4y ago
It is hard to overestimate just how scarce even the median human doctor competency is, at the global scale.
If large language models indeed can give billions access to mostly-reliable medical diagnosis ... it will be a huge humanitarian win.
Honestly, I hoped that this company https://www.humandx.org/ https://www.humandx.org/ will make it real, but at same point they apparently pivoted to providing app-based quiz training to doctors.
Maybe just taking an off the shelf instruct-tuned language model and tuning it on expert-curated corpus of doctor-patient dialogue is the right way of approaching this. Someone will do it, it's not even as costly as people imagine.
Email me if interested.
- nradov 4y agoComputer aided diagnostic software has been around for decades. It isn't very useful in improving medical outcomes. Diagnosis isn't particularly hard in routine cases. The hard part is in gathering relevant data and entering it into a computer. Some parts of that data gathering can be automated to an extent, but in general it remains an unsolved problem. For example, large language models can't collect a useful patient history.
- sinenomine 4y agoI agree with the fundamental data/measurement bottleneck. Humans should likely concentrate our effort on scaling and democratizing this, physical, side of the equation. Still, given the apparent usefulness of basic unaided visual analysis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK330/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK330/ I expect the upcoming multimodal language models to provide a tangible enhancement to diagnosis accuracy, if we allow them to see the photos of the patient.