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Re:Machine learning is booming in medicine, but also facing ... by klodolph on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @07:39AM (#27433796)
You said ML will have “no effect on those procedures unless it's 100% accurate.” I disagree with that, and think it’s a bit absurd—the 100% figure is not possible anyways, so you might as well stick some other impossible predicate in there and the statement is equally insightful.

E.g., “it will have no effect on outcomes until pigs fly.”

There will always be uncertainty, and uncertainty isn’t the only relevant parameter.

Re:Machine learning is booming in medicine, but also facing ... by gjulianm on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @08:52AM (#27434480)
> There will always be uncertainty, and uncertainty isn’t the only relevant parameter.

But it's a really important one and a lot of medical ML research doesn't seem to address in the proper sense. A very simple example: a ML model that classifies lung nodules as benign or malign, with 95% accuracy vs 70% accuracy of regular radiologists. Very good, right? But for actual, real world results, you need to see how the patient outcomes change. If the patients where the model and doctors disagree were going to have extra tests or followup regardless of what the model says, the model is not actually offering anything new despite the increase in accuracy.

So no, it's not absurd to say that models that work for a single type of test need to be very, very accurate to actually bring changes to the procedures that are worth the investment. What matters is whether they actually change patient outcomes, and sometimes it seems like the ML researchers barely consider it.