[muxxa]

I wonder how the pathologists would fare if they were also put through the same process as the ANN, i.e. given training data along with immediate feedback on whether their prognosis was right or wrong, then tested on the reserve data. Pathologists give daily prognosises but only get feedback, if at all, many years later.

[Gatsky]

This is actually the crucial point for me. The care and effort put into training the ANN likely far exceeds the care and effort put into training the pathologist. Pathologists learn their craft like most doctors do - a mixture of consulting text books and supervision by seniors, but mostly just by working it out themselves. Pathologists also tend to optimise for dealing with rare and unusual cases rather than small incremental gains in their performance on routune diagnoses, because of how they are assessed in exams (ie more breadth than depth of knowledge). This gives them good 'general AI' for whatever case walks in the door, rather than a highly constrained test set of one type of case.

[50CNT]

I don't know much about the medical field, so excuse my ignorance in this, but couldn't we train Pathologists on the same data we train ANNs on? That way we could establish similar speed in feedback loops.

[mmierz]

I think this is already done. Pathologists-in-training have to learn somewhere. Machine learning researchers didn't exactly invent the concept of studying practice problems with provided answers, then taking a test.