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by seesthruya 73 days ago
Here we go again. There's something about radiology that makes it the perfect bait for nerd sniping. I guess it's probably the misunderstanding that it is exclusively pattern recognition.

Here are my opinions, after a 20 year career as a diagnostic radiologist, and 45 years as a hobbyist computer programmer

1. There are no products currently on the market that can replace a radiologist.

2. If you can't fully and completely replace radiologists, you will still need them around in significant numbers.

3. Because of the infinite variation in human anatomy, physiology, and pathology, it is my opinion that AGI will be required to fully and completely replace radiologists.

4. Once AI is strong enough to replace radiologists, it will be strong enough to replace every other job as well.

5. Based on current RVU compensation models, any cost savings achieved by hospitals replacing radiologists with AI will quickly be lost by reimbursements being adjusted down. There is no way an insurance company will pay the same for an AI interpretation and a human interpretation.

6. There are significant unanswered medicolegal questions that will need to be addressed before AI can operate unsupervised.

In conclusion, I will work as a human radiologist until I retire in 10 years

3 comments

To support your point, my dentist office did a trial using AI to read the xrays they take of your jaw and teeth. According to the AI reading my xray, I needed every single filling in my teeth replaced because they were all showing signs of leaking.

The dentist reviewed it and told me that there's just too much variation in how places to fillings and the different densities of the filling and the replaced tooth material for the AI to make good judgements. He didn't think any of my fillings would need replacing I likely have many more years before they fail.

this is the key point: it won't save hospitals any money in the long run:

> 5. Based on current RVU compensation models, any cost savings achieved by hospitals replacing radiologists with AI will quickly be lost by reimbursements being adjusted down. There is no way an insurance company will pay the same for an AI interpretation and a human interpretation.

Its hysterically funny you are being downvoted...
Sometimes people can't tolerate hearing other's lived experiences.