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Comment by roncesvalles | Hacker News Reader

I only came to this thread to say that this is completely untrue:

>Human radiologists spend a minority of their time on diagnostics and the majority on other activities, like talking to patients and fellow clinicians.

The vast majority of radiologists do nothing other than: come in (or increasingly, stay at home), sit down at a computer, consume a series of medical images while dictating their findings, and then go home.

If there existed some oracle AI that can always accurately diagnose findings from medical images, this job literally doesn't need to exist. It's the equivalent of a person staring at CCTV footage to keep count of how many people are in a room.

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Agreed, I'm not sure where the OP from TFA is working but around here, radiologists have all been bought out and rolled into Radiology As A Service organizations. They work from home or at an office, never at a clinic, and have zero interactions with the patient. They perform diagnosis on whatever modality is presented and electronically file their work into their EMR. I work with a couple such orgs on remote access and am familiar with others, it might just be a selection bias on my side but TFA does not reflect my first-hand experience in this area.

Interesting - living near a large city, all of the radiologists I know work for hospitals, spending more of their day in the hospital reading room versus home, including performing procedures, even as diagnostic radiologists.

I think it may be selection bias.

> They work from home or at an office, never at a clinic, and have zero interactions with the patient.

Generalizing this to all radiologists is just as wrong as the original article saying that radiologists don't spend the majority of their time reading images. Yes, some diagnostic radiologists can purely read and interpret images and file their results electronically (often remotely through PACS systems). But the vast majority of radiology clinics where I live have a radiologist on-site, and as one example, results for suspicious mammograms where I live in Texas are always given by a radiologist.

And as the other comment said, many radiologists who spend the majority of their time reading images also perform a number of procedures (e.g. stereotactic biopsies).

Holy shit why did I waste my time in tech.

I could have just gone to med school and never deal with layoffs, RTO, etc.

My wife is an ER doctor. I asked her and she said she talks to the radiologists all the time.

I also recently had surgery and the surgeon talked to the radiologist to discuss my MRI before operating.

I'd clarify if her "all the time" means a couple of times a week. For 99.9% of cases an ER doctor would just read what the radiologist wrote in the document.

It's sort of like saying "sometimes a cab driver talks to passengers and suggests a nice restaurant nearby, so you can't automate it away with a self-driving cab."

She said that all the time means more than 1 out of 100 reads but less than 5. It also takes longer for them to discuss a read than it does for them to do the read.

She also said that she frequently talks to the them before ordering scans to consult on what imaging she’s going to order.

> It's sort of like saying "sometimes a cab driver talks to passengers and suggests a nice restaurant nearby, so you can't automate it away with a self-driving cab."

It’s more like if 3/100 kids who took a robot taxi died, suffered injury, had to undergo unnecessary invasive testing, or were unnecessarily admitted to the hospital.

Not an ER physician, but as a paramedic that spent a lot of time in the ER, it depends. Code 3 trauma/medical calls would generally have portable XR brought to the ER room, waiting for our arrival with the patient. In those cases, the XR is taken in the room, not in the DI (diagnostic imaging) wing, and generally the interaction flow will be "XR sent by wifi to radiologist elsewhere, who will then call the ER room and review the imaging live, or very quickly thereafter (i.e. minutes)", because of the emergent need, versus waiting for report dictation/transcription.

What the article suggests is backed up by research, at least in hospital settings: https://www.jacr.org/article/S1546-1440(13)00220-2/abstract

Are these the ones making 500K? Sounds like more of an assistance job than an MD.

Radiologists are often the ones who are the "brains" of medical diagnosis. The primary care or ER physician gets the patient scanned, and the radiologist scrolls through hundreds if not thousands of images, building a mental model of the insides of the patient's body and then based on the tens of thousands of cases they've reviewed in the past, as well as deep and intimate human anatomical knowledge, attempts to synthesize a medical diagnosis. A human's life and wellness can hinge on an accurate diagnosis from a radiologist.

Does that sounds like an assistance's job?

Makes sense. Knowing nothing about it, I was picturing a tech sitting at home looking at pictures saying "yup, there's a spot", "nope, no spot here".

For this job a decade of studies would be a bit wasteful though.

Right, which is why I asked.

>consume a series of medical images while dictating their findings, and then go home.

In the same fashion as construction worker just shows up, "performs a series of construction tasks", then go home. We just need to make a machine that performs "construction tasks" and we can build cities, railways and road networks for nothing but the cost of the materials!

Perhaps this minor degree of oversimplification is why the demise of radiologists have been so frequently predicted?

Saw radiologists at a recent visit in a hospital.

Do you have some kind of source? This seems unlikely.

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