| As a doctor (not a raiologist), I believe your example shows the opposite, that is, it shows how hard it will be to automate radiology. Radiology requires a "theory of the body", so to speak. You can't just look at the image in isolation. You often need detailed knowledge of the patient's clinical situation, and some actual reasoning. My guess is that that's why the surgeons got it right in this case (they are more familiar with the complaints of the patient and with the "live" anatomy of that region). This doesn't mean that radiology can't be automated. It just means that to be a good radiologist, you might need to be a general artificial intelligence, capable of graduating from medical school. This is different from something like classifying moles into benign, malign and high risk. That's something that can be determined from the pixels of a picture (even by human dermatologists, through experience or by following certain simple algorithms), and has no relationship to the rest of the patient. This means that automating mole classification is kinda like automating chess. Automating radiology looks more like automating the command chain for WW2. On the other hand, pathology (looking at tissue samples through the microscope) seems much easier to automate. It relies heavily on pattern recognition and IMO (I'm not a pathologist either, although I've spent time in a pathology lab) it's less dependent on the clinical data of the patient. It's almost as if the doctor were looking at the image and nothing else, and the kinds of pattern doctors are something that might be automated. This is of course a simplification, and sometimes clinical judgement is important even in pathology. None of this means that medicine can't be automated. I'm just trying to convey some of the difficulties you might have in automating radiology, as opposed to other areas of medicine. And in any case, my criterion for difficulty of automating is "does it seem to require a general artificial intelligence or not?". If you have a general artificial intelligence completely indistinguishable from a human, then all bets are off. |