AI Led To an Increase In Radiologists, Not a Decrease 62
Despite predictions that AI would replace radiologists, healthcare systems worldwide are hiring more of them because AI tools enhance their work, create new oversight tasks, and increase imaging volumes rather than reducing workloads. "Put all that together with the context of an aging population and growing demand for imaging of all kinds, and you can see why Offiah and the Royal College of Radiologists are concerned about a shortage of radiologists, not their displacement," writes Financial Times authors John Burn-Murdoch and Sarah O'Connor. Amaka Offiah, who is a consultant pediatric radiologist and a professor in pediatric musculoskeletal imaging at the University of Sheffield in the UK, makes a prediction of her own: "AI will assist radiologists, but will not replace them. I could even dare to say: will never replace them." From the report: [A]lmost all of the AI tools in use by healthcare providers today are being used by radiologists, not instead of them. The tools keep getting better, and now match or outperform experienced radiologists even after factoring in false positives or negatives, but the fact that both human and AI remain fallible means it makes far more sense to pair them up than for one to replace the other. Two pairs of eyes can come to a quicker and more accurate judgment, one spotting or correcting something the other missed. And in high-stakes settings where the costs of a mistake can be astronomical, the downside risk from an error by a fully autonomous AI radiologist is huge. "I find this a fascinating demonstration of why even if AI really can do some of the most high-value parts of someone's job, it doesn't mean displacement (even of those few tasks let alone the job as a whole) is inevitable," concludes John. "Though I also can't help noticing a parallel to driverless cars, which were simply too risky to ever go fully autonomous until they weren't."
Sarah added: "I think the story of radiologists should be a reminder to technologists not to make sweeping assertions about the future of professions they don't intimately understand. If we had indeed stopped training radiologists in 2016, we'd be in a real mess today."
Sarah added: "I think the story of radiologists should be a reminder to technologists not to make sweeping assertions about the future of professions they don't intimately understand. If we had indeed stopped training radiologists in 2016, we'd be in a real mess today."
Sure (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for pointing that out, far too many people think that ChatGPT is representative of all AI. There are a LOT of exceedingly important uses AIs of various types have been put to, this being one one of them. Robotics for example relies on it completely, the days of writing thousands of lines of code just to get your robotic quadruped to walk in a straight line on a level floor are gone (thank goodness). Atlas can do a backflip and Picklebot can unload a truck of random boxes because they are controlle
Re:Sure (Score:5, Informative)
Most of these new AI tools have gained their new levels of performance by incorporating Transformers in some form or another, in part or in whole. Transformers is the backend of LLMs.
Even in cases where Transformers isn't used these days, often it's imitated. For example, the top leaderboards in vision models are a mix of ViTs (Vision Transformers) and hybrids (CNN + transformers), but there are still some "pure CNNs" that are high up. But the best performing "pure CNNs" these days use techniques modeled after what Transformers is doing, e.g. filtering data with an equivalent of attention and the like.
The simple fact is that what enabled LLMs is enabling most of this other stuff too.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see any reason not to trust the Autobots, lets just put it charge of everything then!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Agree. The whole notion is ridiculous.
Re: Sure (Score:1)
Can AI help me to do my own radiology at home, and interpret it without having to bother real humans with my insignificant problems?
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. There are ultrasound wands that can plug into your phone, and AIs that can analyze the scan, for under $3000.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/mems... [ieee.org]
Re: Sure (Score:1)
So those who crave human interaction can continue to visit real doctors and be social, and those of us who become more suicidal with more human interaction can still get some kind of medical care and if it kills us, who will miss us?
Re: (Score:2)
Does that really matter? A radiology AI, a graphical AI, a video AI, an LLM--they all work on the same underlying principles.
Re: (Score:2)
This is the good kind of AI. This isn't a LLM.
So you’re implying it has one fucking job that it appears to not be doing well?
The hell are we ever expecting from an LLM pretending to be smart if we can’t even get One-Trick Tone-E over here..
Ok but (Score:2)
You need lots of highly experienced radiologists to supervise ai, meaning that you have to train them without ai rather than cheat through school with it
Re: (Score:2)
It's not a LLM. There is no supervision since the software doesn't make decisions. It's probably best classed as a type of image enhancement. It just makes the job quicker and therefore cheaper.
And when something in demand gets cheaper it also get used a lot more.
LLMs do get used in healthcare, for note taking, transcribing and form filling. And that does require the doctor to review the final output. Apparently very effective at speeding up of keeping patient records - And doesn't need huge hardware re
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Machine learning is a subset of AI. AI is the category that even contains the path planning algorithms in your DOS games.
https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohi... [csuohio.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
You need lots of highly experienced radiologists to supervise ai, meaning that you have to train them without ai rather than cheat through school with it
Do we find out now or later just how many of those highly experienced radiologists are already being forced to use AI for efficiency, and NOT playing in a classroom with theoretical tumors?
Scariest part about our Toddler AI systems still maturing against incessant greed. Adoption means we blindly believe the fucking salescritter before proving how full of shit they were. Every time.
You do not want AI examining your X-rays (Score:1, Troll)
Not that any of us have any say in this whatsoever. AI bullshit is going to dominate everything whether we like it o
Re: (Score:2)
Calm down. Total AI power consumption (all forms of AL, both training and inference) for 2025 will be in the ballpark of 50-60TWh. Video gaming consumes about 350TWh/year, and growing. The world consumes ~25000 TWh/yr in electricity. And electricity is only 1/5th of global energy consumption.
AI datacentres are certainly a big deal to the local grid where they're located - in the same way that any major industry is a
Re: (Score:2)
You gotta log in if you think anybody is gonna read that long of a rant.
Re:You do not want AI examining your X-rays (Score:5, Insightful)
That "ruler study" was ancient. It's mentioned in peer review at least as early as 2018, and might be even older.
Believe it or not, people in the field are familiar with these sorts of things that you just read about.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I have more confidence in the result an AI would produce, than the result a lot of human doctors. Not that human doctors are bad or incompetent, it's just that they get tired, they work long shifts, they get in a hurry. AI just keeps going.
That's not to say that AI doesn't need supervision, it does. But as an assistant to, say, do initial screenings, I like the concept a lot.
Re: You do not want AI examining your X-rays (Score:1)
Also, what if a doctor doesn't like my attitude?
Re: (Score:1)
The old wolves vs dogs trick, yeah I hope that is accounted for in the training data.
We have a very small window left to the side of we are going to live in a society where around 2,
Sounds like a standard medical scam. (Score:2)
They realized they could process more xrays, so instead of fewer people they ordered more, likely unnecessary, xrays. And you wonder why your insurance just keeps going up.
Re: (Score:1)
If things continue the way they're going with voter suppression and right wing extremists buying up the voting machine companies I don't think it'll matter anymore and then that will be the end of that. About 10% of the country will be allowed to have health care and odds are you won't
Re: Sounds like a standard medical scam. (Score:2)
That is not true. Medical insurance margins are small, and they are legally required to spend a minimum of about 80% on care, higher for employer insurance with a high number of employees. The problem is the underlying costs, and the only way to fix it will be for doctors, drug companies, etc to take a massive haircut and earn less money.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you think drives those prices up? It's like house loans - Make it too easy to transfer the costs to the future and you immediately incentivise charging more in the present.
Re: (Score:2)
spend a minimum of about 80% on care
Indeed, so the more the insurance cartel can charge the more profit they can suck in. That's not a hard equation. Perhaps if there were actually some minimal amount of competition allowed in the business prices might be lower, but that's just crazy talk . . .
Re: (Score:2)
"a single pair of healthcare system"?
I am actually for AI reviews (Score:5, Interesting)
My mother was just diagnosed with HER2 breast cancer. She actually felt the lump and used her own echo machine to scan it before going to her GP. The problem though is that in June she had received a CT scan for measuring an aneurysm in one of her arteries. This CT scan also included the chest. After re-reviewing the CT scan it was plain as day that there was a mass in her right breast. The radiologist missed this incidental finding when reviewing the CT and she went MONTHS without starting treatment. If there was a secondary layer of AI review then I believe it would have been found in June and addressed earlier. Now she's fighting the healthcare system to accelerate her treatment because of this miss. I am as skeptical as any other of LLMs and claims of the next coming of jesus christ, but even with a high false positive rate these kinds of AI re-reviews of CTs, PETs , Xrays or echos could be a valuable tool in evidence based medicine.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, me too. Doctors work long hours, they get tired, they get in a hurry, they miss unusual signs. AI doesn't suffer from these shortcomings.
Re: (Score:2)
In particular in image processing tasks AI usually beats humans. It's also not a new field, there is nobody saying "AI is hype let's do cancer detection with it" but they are doing cancer detection with it because it is well researched and proven to work.
Way too early, way too primitive (Score:2)
The current "AI" is a predictive search engine. It's not AI at all. It looks at something and analyzes what it thinks the result should be. The next gen AI we have, maybe 5-10 years from now, will be the one that starts replacing highly-trained jobs. Right now, you still need a person because of hallucinations, malfunctions, bugs, etc. In a decade, there will be AI machines running on quantum processors that examine everything and give correct answers 99.99% of the time. Once that happens, then you will see
Re: (Score:2)
And *you* are a predictive engine as well; prediction is where the error metric for learning comes from. (I removed the word "search" from both because neither work by "search". Neither you nor LLMs are databases)
And that's not AI why?
AI is, and has always been, the field of tasks that are traditionally hard for computers but easy for humans. There is no question that these are a massive leap fo
Re: (Score:2)
Don't mistake ChatGTP as representative of all types of AI, because it's not. And you shouldn't mistake "highly-trained jobs" as being only ones requiring extensive education, it takes years of training to run the largest heavy equipment but China already has fully automated open pit mining. AI is automating drafting of building plans, logistical planning, and purchasing, all fields where 'hallucinations' would be catastrophic and yet it doesn't occur. The lack of education about this exceedingly importa
Re: (Score:2)
More importantly, these uses are not using massive datacentres to perform their function. It runs fine on local hardware.
... and (Score:2)
Jevons Intensifies
What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About AI And Jobs (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Jevon's Paradox
From radiology to software engineering, the pattern repeats: as technology makes tasks cheaper and faster, demand for human creativity and judgment grows.
YC's Garry Tan explores what history, economics, and real companies show us— that technology doesn't replace people, it redefines what we can do.
Re: (Score:2)
And what about the half of the population which has an IQ lower than 100? Dumb people need to eat too, and if they can't they pick up pitchforks and torches (metaphorically). When robots run by AIs are washing dishes and picking strawberries the people who previously did those jobs are not going to be doing things requiring "human creativity and judgement".
Re: (Score:2)
If you're referring to the Carlin quote, he recognized the difference but had to deliver the line to an audience made up of a goodly portion of people who were already drunk and/or stoned.
If you're referring to what I wrote, the IQ test (which I recognize is not actually accurate because of cultural bias, but it's a phrase that everyone understands) then an IQ of 100 is designed to be the midpoint, with half the population above and half under. Unless it's changed in the last quarter century, it was intend
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I've worked in construction, restaurants, farms, retail and factories, all places heavily populated by the people falling in the lower half of the IQ scale. The majority of dumb people have no more imagination than a sheep, which is why they're also the core Trump voters.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, aside from work, having been part of various
Medicine is not a free market. (Score:2)
Radiology, like other medical specialties is more akin to a medieval guild.
If it really was a free market, we'd already be sending all our scan off to India for reading, instead of importing their doctors.
A radiology nurse can go into business using AI to read scans.
Who controls the market? Who grants entry? The radiologist guild. They have incredible political power.
OTOH, the future does not look so bright for Uber drivers.
Re: (Score:2)
Stupid article (Score:2)
Nobody thought that AI would reduce the number of radiologists. What concerned radiologists was that their pay would be reduced when a robot could do their job.
The real question is how much the per capita income of radiologists has changed to now, vs 5, 10, or even 15 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Radiologists is exactly one of the occupations that was listed for supplanting humans if I'm not mistaken. The fact it isn't coming true is more telling of the expectations of AI capabilities than anything.
As for pay, it'll be rising because demand is higher than ever.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, precisely.
What natural law describes the predilection to change the complaint when it is proven unfounded? Human Nature (tm)?
Economics 101 (Score:4, Insightful)
Aluminum, back when it was a novelty, used to be pricier than gold, people bought it as a status symbol.
Here's the thing: if you reduce the price of something, and demand is elastic, sales volume increases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If the unit cost of an imaging procedure drops, it shifts the optimal resource allocation in healthcare. It becomes more sensible and economical to order radiology than before. Even if volume doubles while AI reduces human involvement by 30%, that's still a net increase in demand for radiologists.
Consider also that more people likely work in today's energy sector—oil extraction, nuclear plant operations—than ever chopped wood for a living in the middle ages. Energy output is vastly higher, efficiency gains are even greater, and total employment is somewhat higher too.
Re: Economics 101 (Score:1)
"Here's the thing: if you reduce the price of something, and demand is elastic, sales volume increases."
How come the crown jewel of capitalism, the stock market, violates this homily?
led to? (Score:2)
Really? They can prove causation? Maybe more people needing radiologists led to an increase in radiologists.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly.
If there was no productivity gain, then they would be hiring even more people to handle demand... which likely would be about the same. The medical cost of early detection is worth it and should have already increased demand. More radiology totally makes sense without any AI cost savings.
As it gets better over time, it slowly boosts productivity until there are only specialists left. Working with humans helps train it even more.
Smeels like.... (Score:2)
Capitalism.