[addcommitpush]

If they had absolute perfect performance at zero cost, you would not need a radiologist.

The current "workflow" is primary care physician (or specialist) -> radiology tech that actually does the measurement thing -> radiologist for interpretation/diagnosis -> primary care physician (or specialist) for treatment.

If you have perfect diagnosis, it could be primary care physician (or specialist) -> radiology tech -> ML model for interpretation -> primary care physician (or specialist.

[MengerSponge]

If we're talking utopian visions, we can do better than dreaming of transforming unstructured data into actionable business insights. Let's talk about what is meaningfully possible: Who assumes legal liability? The ML vendor?

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

[bilbo0s]

Nope.

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.

[philwelch]

Let’s suppose I go to the doctor and get tested for HIV. There isn’t a specialist staring at my blood through a microscope looking for HIV viruses, they put my blood in a machine and the machine tells them, positive or negative. There is a false positive rate and a false negative rate for the test. There’s no fundamental reason you couldn’t put a CT scan into a machine the same way.

[addcommitpush]

In that scenario, the "throat to choke" would be the primary care physician. We won't think of it as an "ML radiologist", just as getting some kind of physical test done and bringing it to the doctor for interpretation.

If you're getting a blood test, the pipeline might be primary care physician -> lab with a nurse to draw blood and machines to measure blood stuff -> primary care physician to interpret the test results. There is no blood-test-ologist (hematologist?) step, unlike radiology.

Anyway, "there's going to be radiologists around for insurance reasons only but they don't bring anything else to patient care" is a very different proposition from "there's going to be radiologists around for insurance reasons _and_ because the job is mostly talking to patients and fellow clinicians".

[bigfudge]

Doesnt this become the developer? Or perhaps a specialist insurer who develops expertise and experience to indemnify them?

[tnel77]

They didn’t say there wouldn’t need to be change related to insurance. They obviously mean that, change included, a perfect model would move to their described workflow (or something similar).

HackerNews is often too quick to reply with a “well actually” that they miss the overall point.