The fun part about those other uses, like MRIs, is that it requires the work of skilled professionals and then apparently weakens the skill of those professionals, which sure sounds like a nasty downward spiral.
This is effectively pitching potential snake oil to the uninformed, while ignoring every real-life issue in the medical industry and side effects it would cause.
Sure, tools make people worse at doing the thing without tools.
Using AutoCAD made draftsmen worse at drafting, that doesn’t matter because there is no occasion where you need to draft complex plans without a computer. If AI diagnosis makes doctors worse at reading MRIs… that would only matter in a world where they’re reading MRIs but also don’t have access to a computer. There is no hospital that has a functional MRI machine that wouldn’t be able to access these tools.
The important thing is that the doctors, when using these AI tools, are measurably more effective. The result is the thing that matters for public health, not any individual’s ability to operate without their tools.
Researchers used the AI model to analyze nearly 2,000 CT scans, including scans from patients later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — all originally interpreted as normal. The system, called the Radiomics-based Early Detection Model (REDMOD), identified 73% of those prediagnostic cancers at a median of about 16 months before diagnosis — nearly double the detection rate of specialists reviewing the same scans without AI assistance.
Doubling the early detection rate of one of the most deadly types of cancers will result in many more lives being saved.
Are you confident that the American healthcare system wouldn’t declare experts to be a redundancy and simply replace them with the AI? Not only would that fit with their well-known profit motive, it is explicitly what AI companies claim they want to do.
I would love to live in a utopia where AI can be used ethically, but it is dangerous to promote the assumption that it magically just will be.
Are you confident that the American healthcare system wouldn’t declare experts to be a redundancy and simply replace them with the AI?
Yes.
Nothing about this tool replaces experts any more than a calculator or computer can replace a human mathematician.
I would love to live in a utopia where AI can be used ethically, but it is dangerous to promote the assumption that it magically just will be.
I don’t assume that AI will always be used ethically (see: War, LLM propaganda bots, etc). Like every technology it is possible to do bad things with it and it will require regulations and laws addressing this.
Dismissing a technology because it is used by bad people, if you actually applied that standard consistently in your life, would have you living naked in a cave without access to fire or tools.
You don’t need to believe in a utopia to understand that a world where 70% of pancreatic cancer is detected 3 years earlier is better than one where 30% of pancreatic cancer is detected 3 years earlier.
FauxLiving, I appreciate your guarantees about the future, but can you demonstrate why the for-profit medical and AI industries wouldn’t cut corners if the AI behaved the way you hope it will?
FauxLiving, a paper isn’t the same as you predicting the future. It does not show the system works. It is disgusting that you pretend to be an astrologer based on these opinions.
Are you confident that the American healthcare system wouldn’t declare experts to be a redundancy and simply replace them with the AI?
That would lead to a legal liability. The reality is all radiology scans and pathology slide images are cross checked by software and if there is a discrepancy, another pathologist is consulted. This is because the error rate of pathologists and radiologists is conservatively 1% which is far too high.
There’s a balance to be struck here. Relying on automation tooling wholesale will always make you worse. There’s a reason that even though we have calculators, it’s important to know the fundamental maths that would let you perform those same calculations yourself. For the majority of people, it’s probably not critical, but if you need to validate that information, you cerainly want to be able to understand how the original conclusion was drawn.
The same goes for software engineering, where AI is seeing heavy use. People asking it to build who programs receive bug riddled and inefficient code, but software engineers who are using it for rapid prototyping or to reduce the work of rewriting common functions in different projects are going to be more effective because they understand what the resulting structure should look like.
AI is not a replacement for the human, and if there’s a future for it, it will be assistive to the fundamentals and knowledge human specialists already posess. But that requires the continued education and development of skills within the industries these tools are deployed in.
Code generation and medical result generation are similar enough to compare (I think), but to expound on the point I was making to the other person I replied to: There is far less medical data online than there is code. We basically have every code textbook online. We have tons of examples to create scaffolds from. We don’t have so much medical data, and the people promoting the tools to the medical field tend to be the tech bros who don’t mention the caveats of what their products can do.
In other words, if AI could be good in medicine, it needs to be rolled out by none of the people who are currently pushing for it, and the caveats need to be explained in a way that none of them do. (It’s not objective, it will not create new science like OpenAI CEO Sam Alman says, etc.) If AI boosters managed to convince the medical field of the same things, they have already convinced politicians and journalists of, I think the result would be rapid quality degradation of treatment, deskilling, lots of unnecessary death. And boosters that promote potential benefits without acknowledging that are being very reckless.
The fun part about those other uses, like MRIs, is that it requires the work of skilled professionals and then apparently weakens the skill of those professionals, which sure sounds like a nasty downward spiral.
Using AI Made Doctors Worse at Spotting Cancer Without Assistance
This is effectively pitching potential snake oil to the uninformed, while ignoring every real-life issue in the medical industry and side effects it would cause.
Sure, tools make people worse at doing the thing without tools.
Using AutoCAD made draftsmen worse at drafting, that doesn’t matter because there is no occasion where you need to draft complex plans without a computer. If AI diagnosis makes doctors worse at reading MRIs… that would only matter in a world where they’re reading MRIs but also don’t have access to a computer. There is no hospital that has a functional MRI machine that wouldn’t be able to access these tools.
The important thing is that the doctors, when using these AI tools, are measurably more effective. The result is the thing that matters for public health, not any individual’s ability to operate without their tools.
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-ai-detects-pancreatic-cancer-up-to-3-years-before-diagnosis-in-landmark-validation-study/
Doubling the early detection rate of one of the most deadly types of cancers will result in many more lives being saved.
That’s not AI. Those algorithms were pattern matching developed at Carnegie Mellon 15 years ago. so now they want to call it AI.
Radiologist and pathologist have always had a massive error rate because of human cognition bias.
Machine Learning isn’t restricted to neural networks.
Seems like that’s a bad thing and we should be happy that there are tools which improve their accuracy.
Are you confident that the American healthcare system wouldn’t declare experts to be a redundancy and simply replace them with the AI? Not only would that fit with their well-known profit motive, it is explicitly what AI companies claim they want to do.
I would love to live in a utopia where AI can be used ethically, but it is dangerous to promote the assumption that it magically just will be.
Yes.
Nothing about this tool replaces experts any more than a calculator or computer can replace a human mathematician.
I don’t assume that AI will always be used ethically (see: War, LLM propaganda bots, etc). Like every technology it is possible to do bad things with it and it will require regulations and laws addressing this.
Dismissing a technology because it is used by bad people, if you actually applied that standard consistently in your life, would have you living naked in a cave without access to fire or tools.
You don’t need to believe in a utopia to understand that a world where 70% of pancreatic cancer is detected 3 years earlier is better than one where 30% of pancreatic cancer is detected 3 years earlier.
FauxLiving, I appreciate your guarantees about the future, but can you demonstrate why the for-profit medical and AI industries wouldn’t cut corners if the AI behaved the way you hope it will?
First, this is a peer-reviewed result not me expressing my hopes.
Second, this application does not replace radiologists. It is a tool for radiologists in one specific type of diagnosis.
If you have some hypothetical future outcome in mind, then the burden of proof is on you to prove your position, not on me to disprove it.
The data shows that this system works.
FauxLiving, a paper isn’t the same as you predicting the future. It does not show the system works. It is disgusting that you pretend to be an astrologer based on these opinions.
That would lead to a legal liability. The reality is all radiology scans and pathology slide images are cross checked by software and if there is a discrepancy, another pathologist is consulted. This is because the error rate of pathologists and radiologists is conservatively 1% which is far too high.
deleted by creator
There’s a balance to be struck here. Relying on automation tooling wholesale will always make you worse. There’s a reason that even though we have calculators, it’s important to know the fundamental maths that would let you perform those same calculations yourself. For the majority of people, it’s probably not critical, but if you need to validate that information, you cerainly want to be able to understand how the original conclusion was drawn.
The same goes for software engineering, where AI is seeing heavy use. People asking it to build who programs receive bug riddled and inefficient code, but software engineers who are using it for rapid prototyping or to reduce the work of rewriting common functions in different projects are going to be more effective because they understand what the resulting structure should look like.
AI is not a replacement for the human, and if there’s a future for it, it will be assistive to the fundamentals and knowledge human specialists already posess. But that requires the continued education and development of skills within the industries these tools are deployed in.
Code generation and medical result generation are similar enough to compare (I think), but to expound on the point I was making to the other person I replied to: There is far less medical data online than there is code. We basically have every code textbook online. We have tons of examples to create scaffolds from. We don’t have so much medical data, and the people promoting the tools to the medical field tend to be the tech bros who don’t mention the caveats of what their products can do.
In other words, if AI could be good in medicine, it needs to be rolled out by none of the people who are currently pushing for it, and the caveats need to be explained in a way that none of them do. (It’s not objective, it will not create new science like OpenAI CEO Sam Alman says, etc.) If AI boosters managed to convince the medical field of the same things, they have already convinced politicians and journalists of, I think the result would be rapid quality degradation of treatment, deskilling, lots of unnecessary death. And boosters that promote potential benefits without acknowledging that are being very reckless.