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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

> What behind the scenes context would make it impossible?

The MD context. One first needs to train AI to perform the job of a general MD before you can get into stuff like radiology (that is, their real job, not what some novice CS grads, or not so novice AI experts like Hinton imagine it to be - I.e. not segmenting things into funky shapes or running some funky black box magic that spits out "tumor/not tumor" with no context whatsoever, no. Actually diagnosing real people, where a life is on the line, and if you fuck up enough times, your career).

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> The MD context. One first needs to train AI to perform the job of a general MD before you can get into stuff like radiology

That's true. Waymo had to train their AI to perform the job of a firefighter for them to recognize a fire hydrant and a firetruck.

> I.e. not segmenting things into funky shapes or running some funky black box magic that spits out "tumor/not tumor" with no context whatsoever, no.

... But that's the goal right? There's a tumor right there at these coordinates or not.

No, identifying the tumor is only step 1, and is the easiest step. Most non-radiologists can identify whether a tumor is present. The harder part (and the true value of radiologist reads) is everything that comes after finding the tumor: what structures are the tumor invading? Is there spread to lymph nodes? Are there secondary findings that might affect the diagnosis or treatment?

These questions and their relevance changes for every individual case, and while each question by itself may be approachable with AI, getting a detailed and relevant report without meaningless noise from an AI ensemble is a very very hard problem.

Finally an answer that's not just throwaway accounts flagging a submission!

These are all interesting problems where I could see an AI struggling. I guess the next step, once tumor identification becomes a solved problem, will be to train the AI on treatment data and follow-up, ie, this is an example where there was spread to lymph nodes.

Interesting times ahead!

> But that's the goal right?

Part of it.

Human doctors will not only tell you if there's something funky in the image, but will also interpret it in light of a patient's medical history, symptoms, possible diagnoses, etc.

Subtle shading near some structure involved in one of two possible conditions might be very important, but an obvious cyst in an unrelated organ likely means nothing. People are weird close-up!

This is an excellent point. An AI may be able to do a diagnosis to you, but a doc could do diagnosis+post diagnosis, with the foresight of medical history. Theoretically an AI could possibly do this as well, but we're nowhere close.

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