CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI

Shank

> “For women who aren’t considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it’s wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000,” Lubarsky said. I mean, if I were a choosing person and I could choose to have a human radiologist review AND an AI review I think I would prefer that. 3/10,000 sounds like a very good rate but a false negative on a cancer diagnosis is life threatening, no?

jacknews

Surely they could offer a cheaper 'unregulated, no guarantee' AI interpretation with a confidence rating, and an optional follow-up 'are you sure?' expert assessment at full price. OTOH they're probably planning to charge full price anyway, but massively reduce costs, because, profit.

GerryAdamsSF

He is blatantly and obviously lying likely to boost stock prices. Radiologists do physical procedures too.

squidhunter

When can we start replacing CEOs with AI?

cbg0

> Sandra Scott, MD, CEO of the One Brooklyn Health, a small hospital facing tight margins, agreed with this line of thinking, according to Crain’s. Does this CEO of a small hospital realize that their hospital will take the legal responsibility if there's no doctor to sue for malpractice?

mrtksn

Why AI is able to do everything except CEO and social media hype up work? Why engineers and doctors still need CEOs to do their job? From the votes I see that this is unpopular opinion but apparently there are close to 400 million companies in the world, of those 60K are publicly traded. I am sure that there's enough data to train top notch CEO on this, since they are required to keep records all the time and give speeches for living. Surely privately owned companies where the CEO is also the owner wouldn't like it but replacing the CEO with an AI in institutions with professional CEOs seems overdue. The radiologist AI certainly will be much better served by AI CEO.

RA_Fisher

That’s good, reducing healthcare costs will increase access and boost the our health. Agree that AI should replace CEOs. They’re often biased in unhelpful ways that AI isn’t and it costs people wellbeing.

bradreaves2

I figured this was “CEO said a thing” journalism [1], but buried in the last paragraph is a real scorcher: > “Undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients: easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care,” [Radiologist Dr.] Suhail told Radiology Business. “Any attempt to implement AI-only reads would immediately result in patient harm and death, and only someone with zero understanding of radiology would say something so naive. But in some sense, they’re correct: Hospitals are happy to cut costs even if it means patient harm, as long as it’s legal.” [1] https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/

luma

Brother-in-law graduated med school in the early 90s and has been a practicing ER physician since. We discussed this recently and he related that his advisors told him not to go into radiology back in the late 80s because the assumption was that computers were going to take over the field. He's not too far away from retirement and it's only now that we're starting to see some signs of this prediction from 30+ years ago. As others in the thread note, there are plenty of concerns around operational use of AI solutions in the medical space, but radiology has a much larger target painted on it than other practices as a fair portion of the job (but certainly not all!) can boil down to high-skill pattern recognition from visual inputs. The current list of AI-enabled devices going through FDA approval is public, more than 3/4 of the list are targeting radiology use cases: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-...

k2xl

Didn't we just hear predictions about this from Geoffery a few years ago that turned out to be false? I could have sworn I heard Jensen talk about how the inverse has happened? Don't we have more radiologists than we did five years ago?

elephanlemon

>amid rising demand for imaging Okay so demand for imaging is up, so we should GET RID of the radiologists? How about we AUGMENT them with AI so that they can do their job better and faster? Why does it need to be either or?

storus

How about we started replacing all companies that are replacing humans with AI using AI as well? As they decided to one-way participate in the economy (suck the money, not give anything back), we can make sure the one-way trend is done with rapidly. The cost of running a company will approach zero in the future. We now have massively profitable companies that are making record layoffs; something doesn't compute.

voidUpdate

> "and is “actually better than human beings,” he told the audience. “For women who aren’t considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it’s wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000,” Lubarsky said. " What's the false negative rate for human beings? And what about women that are considered high risk? Is it better or worse?

seesthruya

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

roody15

This should not be surprising. The CEO's primary objective is likely to increase profits and so this will be his/her primary focus. Even if the technology is not ready for prime time just making announcements like this likely helps increase negotiating pressure on radiologist group contracts and salaries.

WarmWash

I stand to be corrected, but last time this cropped up about a year ago, there was a pretty severe mismatch in the use of the word "AI". The NYT ran a story about "AI taking over radiology", where they talked to radiologists at the Mayo clinic (who have an AI research lab), who flatly told NYT that no - AI will not be replacing radiologists, the AI is not good enough. Here is the rub though, the "AI Lab" was doing research using local CNN's with ~30M parameters. Basically 2017 consumer GPU tier AI tech. I don't know yet if there has been a modern transformer of datacenter scale that has been explicitly pre-trained for medicine/radiology, along with extensive medical/radiology RLHF.

coldtea

Anything to please the stockholders. It's not like patient's best interests mattered much to them before AI either.

beardyw

"We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment" Perhaps they cost a great number of money?

amluto

I find the whole field of radiology to be utterly baffling. There are doctors who specialize in, and hopefully understand, specific diseases and/or parts of the body. But we have radiologists who are supposed to be able to look at images, taken by quite a variety of technologies and parameters, of any part of the body, and are expected to accurately interpret the findings, possibly without any relevant context. In my personal experience interacting with the medical system, it’s, unsurprisingly, quite common for an actual specialist to look at the same images a radiologist looked at, and see something quite different. And it’s nearly always the case that a specialist or a reasonable careful non-specialist who is willing to read a bit of the literature or even ask a chatbot [0], will figure out that at least half of what the radiologist says is utterly irrelevant. So I think that the degree to which ML can perform as well as a radiologist is not necessarily a great measurement for ML’s ability to assist with medical care. [0] Carefully. Mindlessly asking a chatbot will give complete nonsense.

beej71

"They're is almost certainly cancer there." Are you sure? "You're right to push back. Upon reinspection, it appears to be something else."