thisancog

It's fun! The animations are great, too! I just wanted to add, somewhat related, that the Icelandic languages has the word "tölva" for "computer", a neologism comprised of the words for "number" and "prophetess", so if you will, the game's protagonist is a very literal computer.

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Medicine isn't a good nail to hammer with a LLM, though. I struggle to see how a stochastic token completion system, prone to hallucination, let alone all the attack vectors described over the last months and years, would do any good in the medical domain.

A medical paper isn't just a digestible blog post or conversational op-ed, it's full of technical jargon and statistics that even require expert readers to do some unpacking in order to evaluate how the presented findings fit into a larger picture. Indeed, it's a skill and often a form of art to be able to read and understand medical papers, even from within one's field of expertise. Aside from that, medical knowledge is never truly established, it is always in flux, both in respect to ongoing research and in the skill that derives from decade long practice of negotiating this with often more complex and nuanced real-world situations, i.e. with the patients that come through the doctor's office doors.

Doctors already face(d) the toll of diagnosis within a Google search's reach: misinformed, anxious and often outright overconfident patients often stand in their own way. That is not to say, that medical literacy and knowledge for the masses would be a detrimental thing, quite the contrary is true. However, with the high stakes faced in medicine, any misinformation, be it by Google or LLM can lead to grave harms.

Hernia surgery is not only routine, but quite straight forward. Mesh implants are easy to handle and offer a good long-term outcome. It's one of the first interventions a beginner in the field would learn to master. Also, I am not sure about Sierra Leone, but in Europe and the US it is commonly done as a keyhole surgery, so it requires some dexterity with the tools. The study chose to examine open surgery, which is easier to perform but leads to more post-operative complications. Also, they only looked at elective surgery, so only at cases when the hernia didn't cause further problems demanding a more timely treatment, such as bowel constriction or even inflammation or incarceration. These can be much more challenging to treat properly.

All that being said, the authors purposefully sought to compare performance for a type of surgery that doesn't offer many obstacles for somebody new to the job. I guess it helps to identify tasks that highly-skilled MDs are freed up from doing when they are already scarce in a given location. But it's hardly an indicator that much what they do could be done by others, as some would probably like to believe.