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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

China won't have an issue with it.

The US won't have an issue with it. You haven't realized what the US has become.

A place where it's still possible to innovate, despite the best efforts of the copyright lobby?

I've noticed a funny trend where people will bring up an ethical concern and some dweeb will immediately roll out the Chinese strawman like it justifies their incredibly dubious position.

"We should violate medical privacy laws on an enormous scale because China" Okay buddy.

The Red Scare never ended for a whole lot of Americans. And my foot is more communist than modern China is. But you know, being afraid of Communism is just as, if not in fact easier, when you have no clue what Communism actually is.

Is that worse than being worse off technologically than China and the consequences that bears

Do you really feel life has been horrible in all these countries which have been worse off technologically than the US for the past decades?

Being first is not the same as being happy.

If we become worse off than China, it's because we squandered a massive decades long lead and actively moved critical industrial processes over there, not because we didn't let AI companies scrape HIPAA data.

Because the end result is either paying China to eval scans, buy models from China that do it, or settle for inferior scan reading by humans.

I wasn't suggesting that we should, but in my lifetime we went from hospital admissions and discharges being published in the local paper, to that information being some of the most closely guarded with (theoretically) severe penalties for disclosure.

I think it was AIDS and people not wanting to be outed that changed things.

But whatever the reason, we now have HIPAA and it adds a huge amount of complexity to the management of medical records, and a huge amount of complexity to any research that needs access to a broad spectrum of medical case histories (such as training AI). Other countries don't have these concerns, and will outcompete the US on developing these capabilities.

Concerns about HIPAA as an obstacle to research are largely a red herring. Almost no clinically useful research can be accomplished by just processing large volumes of historical patient charts. In practice the researchers will have to gather additional data from study subjects so they're going to need to obtain consent anyway.

People keep claiming that other countries will out compete us in medical research and it keeps not happening.

yes but you can train relatively dumb AI on high volumes of historical data and presenting factors. This is typically just a 'diagnostic assist', but often significantly better than a human

Better how? Do you have a citation for that?

I did work on a diagnostic assist tool developed by a large pharma which diagnosed between Asthma and COPD. GPs get this right 52% time, specialists just over 60 and AI came in over 80%...using 12 relatively mundane input variables. I believe there are a lot of these situations, but not clear pathway to FDA approval

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