I find it hard to believe human doctors miss malignant tumors in less than 1 out of every 10 million cases.
As the parent poster put it, it's only a problem if the average doc won't detect it. If it's truly a 1 in 10-million thing, an extreme edge or corner case, malpractice courts may not have a problem with you missing it -- as they say "if you hear hooves, do you think of horses or zebras?". 99% of the time a different diagnosis is the right one, and even at five-nines you're letting someone through eventually.
Whenever someone says "as long as it's better than a human", that's where my mind goes. We shouldn't be satisfied with just being better than a human. We shouldn't be satisfied with five nines! I don't really care about what courts have a problem with — my point is just that our goal should be zero preventable deaths, not just moving from humans to AI once the latter can be better on average than the former.
They've already done it with outsourcing; a large chunk of what used to be done entirely in-house has been contracted out to remote overseas doctors.
From what I understand it isn't even possible generally to see a doctor remotely in a cheaper state, because medical licensing is per-state.
Medical billing has also been offshored to India+Pakistan btw
In general, a lot of back office Dental+Medical functions were outsourced in the 2000s+2010s.
Eg. Paper about this from 2006 - https://ipc.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2019-01/06-005.pdf
This does seem like an odd outcome though, right? I guess fundamentally people will be legally/economically advantageous in some sense because the amount of insurance that an individual doctor can be expected to hold is much less than a hospital. Is the fate of humans to exist not as a unit of competence, but as a unit of ablative legal armor?
Meanwhile, in every country that isn't America, tumor detection rates go up, cancer outcomes improve, and the cost of delivery falls.
Americans continue to claim their system of funding insurance company profits rather than actual healthcare is best.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...
I don't think results are anywhere close to that in the field. If hospitals could do without radiologists, they would do so immediately. Currently, we are seeing very little technical progress due to applied statistics in the field, and the real cause of that is that tech people don't understand what we do and why we're still very much needed. The problem lies more in information retrieval capabilities than acting on the data itself.
I think people probably overestimate (maybe vastly) how good at differential diagnosis most doctors are.
Those probabilities are way off given biology, but anyway ...
The interesting cases of AI in radiology would be being able to catch stuff that a human has no hope of catching.
For example, a woman with lobular (instead of ductal) breast cancer generally doesn't present until mid-to-late Stage 3 (which limits treatment options) because those cancers don't form lumps.
You can stare at mammograms and ultrasounds all day and won't see anything because the "lumps" are unresolvable. You're trying to find a sleet particle in a blizzard. Sure, it's totally obvious on an MRI scan, but you don't want to do those without reason (picking up totally benign growths, gadolinium bioaccumulation, infections from IVs, etc.)
An AI, however, could correlate subtle, but broad changes that humans are really bad at catching. Your last 5 mammograms looked like this but there is just something a little off about this one--go get an MRI this time.
Yeah, I suspect a lot of fields will have a similar trajectory to how AI has impacted radiology.
It might catch the tumor in 99.9999% of cases, better than any human doctor. But missing a malignant tumor 0.0001% of the time is unacceptable, because it spikes the hospital's malpractice costs. So every single scan still has to be reviewed manually by a doctor first, then by the AI as a fallback.
In theory there's some insurance scheme that could overcome this, but in practice when you have software reviewing millions of scans a day you're opening yourself up to class action lawsuits in a way no competent human doctor would.