[gforge]

I'm an orthopedic surgeon with over two decades of coding experience and the last six years I've been working on developing deep learning models for muskuloskeletal images. Despite being in a rather narrow field, only focusing on trauma radiographs, the complexity of the task is hard to overstate. We have piloted our software with our radiologists at the hospital, but the amount of features you need so that the clinicians actually feel that there is any benefit, are huge. At the moment we're training 480+ different labels and I still think we're not even half way for trauma radiographs.

[bitL]

Which datasets are you using? I've only used Stanford's MURA so far.

[gforge]

We have our own dataset that we're annotating.

[s5300]

Very glad to know that people with experience are doing things like this.

The current state of medical care with regards to musculoskeletal issues is fucking abysmal, at least within the US...

[gforge]

There is though a lot of good research coming out of the US but from my understanding they can be rather expensive. Sweden has probably some of the best hip arthroplasty outcomes but the cost of these is roughly 5-10 times lower than in the states. I think the system is somewhat stacked against you, if doctors (also human beings) spend 80-100 hours/week during their residency, they expect a financial reward afterwards or no-one would agree to that.

Orthopedics is also somewhat of an odd medical specialty with lots of incentive issues and a scarcity of good clinical trials. In a study from Sydney they found that among the 50% of the surgeries that had been evaluated with randomized clinical trials (RCT), only in 50% of the cases the trials actually supported the surgery. It is though much more difficult to randomize people to surgery, doing the blue or red pill is much easier.

I'm pretty sure also that a big part of the problem is us doctors failing to identify if a patient is part of the long tail or not, i.e. does he/she not fall into a particular study's inclusion criteria or not? Hopefully we will be able to shortcut this problem with deep learning tools but as most self-driving-car enthusiast know - there is a big difference driving around in the parking lot from the open streets.