Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaced-out | Hacker News Reader

>It might catch the tumor in 99.9999% of cases, better than any human doctor. But missing a malignant tumor 0.0001% of the time is unacceptable, because it spikes the hospital's malpractice costs. So every single scan still has to be reviewed manually by a doctor first, then by the AI as a fallback.

I find it hard to believe human doctors miss malignant tumors in less than 1 out of every 10 million cases.

View on HN

The point is that it may miss a tumor obvious to a human doctor.

As long as on average it performs better that should not be an issue.

If also passing the scan by a human is feasible to do, and clearly it is because previously that’s what we were doing, and will reduce the error rate even further what’s the argument for not doing it?

"So sorry the AI missed your malignant tumor! On average, it actually performs better than a human doctor. I mean, a human doctor definitely would have caught this one, and yeah, you're going to die, but hopefully the whole average thing makes you feel better!"

Does the opposite work too? What if a human doctor mis-diagnoses me but I can prove in court that an available medical grade AI would have given the correct diagnosis. Could I sue for that?

I don’t really understand why you’d ask this. The point is to save as many lives as possible.

We acknowledge that both humans and "medical grade AI" are flawed, but they're flawed in very different ways and until we can understand how and why an AI model fails, it should be supplemental.

We already accept that a particular doctor, even if they are an expert, can miss a tumor that could be obvious to a second doctor.

The standards for medical malpractice are super nuanced and variable but the general idea is the "man on the street" concept, or in this case "the average doctor" concept.

As the parent poster put it, it's only a problem if the average doc won't detect it. If it's truly a 1 in 10-million thing, an extreme edge or corner case, malpractice courts may not have a problem with you missing it -- as they say "if you hear hooves, do you think of horses or zebras?". 99% of the time a different diagnosis is the right one, and even at five-nines you're letting someone through eventually.

I always think of comparisons to aviation. There are a million and one things that can go wrong when flying a plane, but it's still one of the safest ways to travel. That's because regulations and safety standards are to such a high degree that we simply don't consider injury or death an acceptable outcome.

Whenever someone says "as long as it's better than a human", that's where my mind goes. We shouldn't be satisfied with just being better than a human. We shouldn't be satisfied with five nines! I don't really care about what courts have a problem with — my point is just that our goal should be zero preventable deaths, not just moving from humans to AI once the latter can be better on average than the former.

I'm pretty sure koboll's point was that by having a doctor in the loop, the hospital can wash their hands of that one person's malpractice suit easy enough. Just fire the doctor, let their individual insurance deal with it, and move on. When the hospital cuts out the middle man, they take on a new level of direct accountability they don't currently have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com