Demand for Human Radiologists Is at an All-Time High

It's clearly satire with the little jabs like this.

I mean if you change the data to fit your argument you will always make it look correct.

Lets assume we stop in 2016 like he said, where do we get the 1000 radiologist the US needs a year?

People can't tell what they'll eat next sunday but they'll predict AGI and singualrity in 25 years. It's comfy because 25 years seems like a lot of time, it isn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

> I'd wager in 25 years we'd get there so I think his opinion still has a large percentage of being correct.

What percent, and which maths and facts let you calculate it ? The only percent you can be sure about is that it's 100% wishful thinking

Maybe don't?

At the time? I would say he was a AI evangelist.

With interventional radiologists and radio-oncologists it's different but were talking about radiologists here...

As a related aside, I've started seeing businesses clearly using ChatGPT for their logos. You can tell from the style and how much random detail there is contrasted with the fact that it's a small boba tea shop with two employees. I am still trying to organize my thoughts on that one.

Edit:

Example: https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/brookf...

The kiosk is placed inside of a clinic/hospital setting, and rather than driving to the pharmacy, you pick up your medications at the kiosk.

Pharmacists are currently still very involved in the process, but it's not necessarily for any technical reason. For example, new prescriptions are (by most states' boards of pharmacies) required to have a consultation between a pharmacist and a patient. So the kiosk has to facilitate a video call with a pharmacist using our portal. Mind you, this means the pharmacist could work from home, or could queue up tons of consultations back to back in a way that would allow one pharmacist to do the work of 5-10 working at a pharmacy, but they're still required in the mix.

Another thing we need to do for regulatory purposes is when we're indexing the medication in the kiosk, the kiosk has to capture images of the bottles as they're stocked. After the kiosk applies a patient label, we then have to take another round of images. Once this happens, this will populate in the pharmacist portal, and a pharmacist is required to take a look at both sets of images and approve or reject the container. Again, they're able to do this all very quickly and remotely, but they're still required by law to do this.

TL;DR I make an automated dispensing kiosk that could "replace" pharmacists, but for the time being, they're legally required to be involved at multiple steps in the process. To what degree this is a transitory period while technology establishes a reputation for itself as reliable, and to what degree this is simply a persistent fixture of "cover your ass" that will continue indefinitely, I cannot say.

A) The night before, a woman in her 40's came in to the ER suffering a major psychological breakdown of some kind (she was vague to protect patient privacy). The Dr prescribed a major sedative, and the software alerted that they didn't have a negative pregnancy test because this drug is not approved for pregnant women and so should not be given. However, in my wife's clinical judgement- honed by years of training, reading papers, going to conferences, actual work experience and just talking to colleagues- the risk to a (potential) fetus from the drug was less than the risk to a (potential) fetus from mom going through an untreated mental health episode and so she approved the drug and overrode the alert.

B) A prescriber had earlier in that week written a script for Tylenol to be administered "PR" (per-rectum) rather than PRN (per requisite need). PR Tylenol is a perfectly valid thing that is sometimes the correct choice, and was stocked by the hospital for that reason. But my wife recognized that this wasn't one of the cases where that was necessary, and called the nurse to call the prescriber to get that changed so the nurse wouldn't have to give them a Tylenol suppository. This time there were no alerts, no flags from the software, it was just her looking at it and saying "in my clinical judgement, this isn't the right administration for this situation, and will make things worse".

So someone- with expensively trained (and probably licensed) judgement- will still need to look over the results of this AI pharmacist and have the power to override its decisions. And that means that they will need to have enough time per case to build a mental model of the situation in their brain, figure out what is happening, and override if necessary. And it needs to be someone different from the person filling out the Rx, for Swiss cheese model of safety reasons.

Congratulations, we've just described a pharmacist.

IDK, these are just limitations - people that really believe in AI will tell you there is basically nothing it can't do... eventually. I guess it's just a matter of how long you want to wait for eventually to come.

If every doctor agreed to electronically prescribe (instead of calling it in, or writing it down) using one single standard / platform / vendor, and all pharmacy software also used the same platform / standard, then our jobs are definitely redundant.

I worked at a hospital where basically doctors and pharmacists and nurses all use the same software and most of the time we click approve approve approve without data entry.

Of course we also make IVs and compounds by hand, but that's a small part of our job.

The other answer is that AI will not hold your hand in the ICU, or share with you how their mother felt when on the same chemo regimen that you are prescribing.

To understand why, you would really need to take a good read of the average PCP's malpractice policy.

The policy for a specialist would be even more strict.

You would need to change insurance policies before your workflow was even possible from a liability perspective.

Basically, the insurer wants, "a throat to choke", so to speak. Handing up a model to them isn't going to cut it anymore than handing up Hitachi's awesome new whiz-bang proton therapy machine would. They want their pound of flesh.

PCPs don't have the training and aren't paid enough for that exposure.

That's fine. But then the xray tech becomes the radiologist, and that becomes the point in the workflow that the insurer digs out the malpractice premiums.

In essence, your xray techs would become remarkably expensive. Someone is talking to the clinicians about the results. That person, whatever you call them, is going to be paying the premiums.

I also recently had surgery and the surgeon talked to the radiologist to discuss my MRI before operating.

In the same fashion as construction worker just shows up, "performs a series of construction tasks", then go home. We just need to make a machine that performs "construction tasks" and we can build cities, railways and road networks for nothing but the cost of the materials!

Perhaps this minor degree of oversimplification is why the demise of radiologists have been so frequently predicted?

Do you have some kind of source? This seems unlikely.

It seems that with AI in particular, many operate with 0/1 thinking in that it can only be useless or take over the world with nothing in between.

Not just radiologists but surgeons too for example.

Depends on if the patient sues and how that goes.

It won't lead to bankruptcy as malpractice insurance is there but your premiums would go higher and it could still be costly.

The interesting thing is that there are problems for which this rule applies recursively. Of the remaining 20%, most of it is easier than the remaining 20% of what is left.

Most software ships without dealing with that remaining 20%, and largely that is OK; it is not OK for safety critical systems though.

Is there any saying that exists about overestimating stuff in the near term and long term but underestimating stuff in the midterm? Ie flying car dreams in the 50s etc.