[tellak]

I am actually an MD.

> Had we enforced a full-body MRI for every patient, we would quickly amass enough imaging data to know which anomalies are malignant and which are not to a very high degree

How, pray tell, are we actually determining which are malignant and which are not?? I’ll give you a hint: the charitable explanation is you are completely ignorant, the less charitable one is that you consider Mengele and Ishii modern medicine heroes. And that is even if the determination by imaging alone is even possible.

Once again I have to point out on HN... not everyone in the medical world is an idiot incapable of analytical thinking, it is just that a lot of us care about ethics. Our patients, even in research, are more than just numbers.

[skwb]

I don't even think it's about the ethics that necessarily make this statement wrong (though, you are correct in that HN needs to consider basic ethics on a much more frequent basis).

In the case of these detections, the ground truth can be very subjective and is certainly not a simple explanation. Is the ground truth read by a radiologist? A radiologist with fellowship training? Multiple radiologists? Biopsied? Followed for 5 years to see if the patient actually died of their tumor?

The complexity is a lot more than the underlying algorithms and computer science (though they are important!).

[WoodenChair]

> How, pray tell, are we actually determining which are malignant and which are not?

When people on this forum speculate about things like this, I assume they are thinking of some future ML application. Of course you're right though, that is not doable today. The point of the OP is that if we collected more data perhaps it would be possible.

> the less charitable one is that you consider Mengele and Ishii modern medicine heroes.

The ad hominem attacks against the OP are completely unnecessary.

> I am actually an MD.

The start of your post feels like "appeal to authority."

[tomcam]

> The start of your post feels like "appeal to authority."

Sounds like a declaration of fact to me

[WoodenChair]

What I mean is, just because the person is "actually an MD" doesn't mean the person has expertise in this specific area yet the person is using it to claim such. I.E. some might call me a computer scientist, but that doesn't mean I have enough expertise in machine learning, a sub-discipline, to say definitively that the OP's idea about using full body scan data is feasible.

Should I have started my post "I am actually a computer scientist." No, right? That would be an appeal to authority that doesn't prove I know anything about what I'm talking about. Now, if the person had started with "I am a radiologist who has looked at empirical data about full body scans versus more selective scans." that would be a more useful and valid statement.

[tellak]

It’s not a big deal. I only mentioned as a response because the op started off saying they were from a family of MDs.

Also the vast majority of practicing physicians are expected to have detailed expertise to understand the indications, application, and interpretation of imaging within their speciality. Most imaging orders are issued by medical or surgical staff, not radiologists.

[WoodenChair]

My problem with your post is not that you're not a radiologist (that was just an example—and maybe I should've just written "person who has experience doing empirical studies of body scans"). It's that you use your status as "an actual MD" but that is clearly not enough and a real "appeal to authority" or "appeal to anecdotes." And then you combined that with some awful things that you compared OP to.

Looking through your post history you often jump to "appeal to authority" combined with name calling and it's a pattern that reeks of arrogance to me.

For example one of your posts starts out along the lines of, I'm not a 747 pilot, but I am a pilot... in a post about something specific to the 747 and you say the other guy was "talking out their ass." Again, not super relevant appeal to authority and some mean-spirited name calling.

> Not a 747 pilot (not sure why that matters here)... but a pilot. The flight positions are equal. The plane is designed to be flown the same from either flight position and this is routinely done. The guy saying otherwise is talking out their ass.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19675391

Another of your posts both claims you were trained as engineer and manages to call someone "full of crap" in the first two sentences.

> I personally think the gp is full of crap. I’m trained as an engineer and worked in industry a few years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674031

You just seem to love to tell everyone you're super special and smarter than them because of your accomplishments as a means of arguing and then put them down. It gives you instant validity to some of course, but I think it's just lazy. Your arguments should stand on their own merit. Not request to authority or anecdotes from your kind-of-related experience.

[Aeolun]

> How, pray tell, are we actually determining which are malignant and which are not??

A biopsy? Whichever method you would normally use to find this out?

You could even ignore all the information and just train your algorithm on whether the patient died in the next 5 years (after the scan/s).

Obviously you need data before you can determine anything automatically. But I don’t think everyone would be averse to this even if you do tell them it might be more likely to kill them due to excessive testing.