
Ask HN: How far along is the development of AI for reading medical scans? - czatt
I&#x27;ve read some sources saying that there isn&#x27;t enough labelled data available to properly train an algorithm, and some saying that there are already viable solutions being tested at hospitals. What are existing AI solutions capable of doing so far in this field, and how long would it take for them to be commercially used by hospitals &#x2F; healthcare providers?
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bsenftner
About 7-10 years ago I tech-MBA-style consulted with a half dozen medical scan
reading via machine learning startups in Southern California. In each case, I
noticed the CEOs being overwhelmed by their investors, loosing control as soon
as their potential was validated, and sold to giant healthcare corps, most
often against the protests of the founders. In each of these situations, the
startups were working with large offshore teams annotating medical scans for
their ML training. I was usually hired to write a prospectus or similar
investment document, so my exposure to each startup was brief. But in every
case, the founding team kind of were knocked off their feet by the aggression
of their investors. I checked back with two of the CEOs about two years ago,
and both of their startups were shutdown after acquisition.

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davismwfl
Oh the fun. Yes, there are some solutions being tested for specific types of
scans and specific diagnosis, but not nearly enough is operational yet.

My "short" answer: There are a number of people/companies researching AI for
medical scans/records, but it is true that finding enough properly documented
and labeled scans/images/records etc is hard. Privacy laws also add a fairly
high burden which makes the research hard, the privacy laws/rules are needed
but sometimes they are more about adding road blocks than actually protecting
anyone's privacy.

Another part to getting good training sources is in more complex scenarios
there isn't always one answer for a given scan, or it is possible multiple
issues can be found. So it is hard sometimes to isolate the specific issue in
some scans which adds complexity. Add to this that if you have 4 medically
trained people read the scan independently and without influence you will
generally get different answers to all but the simplest diagnosis.

There are places in medicine that are easier and where more consistency is
available and that is where the current set of most algorithms and work is
being done. Some things are also easier to box into categories than others, so
again that makes them lower hanging fruit which is what I see happening right
now. All that said, to bring product to commercial market is the largest gap
IMO, lots of companies/people have researched and built
tools/algorithms/models but few have cleared the FDA in the U.S. I'd say the
biggest hurdle right now is bringing products to commercialization and
understanding how to do so.

As for most current AI: Most of what is commercially available is not
predictive and instead is used as aids in finding missed data points that
might change the diagnosis or highlight something specific for treatment. For
example, there are some that highlight fractures that would otherwise be
missed by a radiologist reading an x-ray. Same thing for CT/MRI scans where
sometimes literally thousands of images are generated for a single scan and
missing something is not unheard of. More work has been done around imagery
analysis than on most other parts of the patient record IMO, so you'll find
more data around that side than you would around vitals analysis or predictive
diagnostics.

Honestly I could go on about this for a long time. This is an area ripe for
innovation but has regulatory hurdles most startups fail to grasp and fail to
navigate.

I am the CTO for a startup that is working on these types of problems (vitals
& predictive specifically), we have one FDA cleared product and see many
opportunities to make a positive impact on patient care.

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czatt
Thank you for the response! This seems to be a sector that could highly
benefit from AI development, especially given the number of required medical
scans is steadily increasing and the number of qualified radiologists is
declining in most countries. Given you are in the sector, could you share the
names of a few companies / startups that you think are making the most
progress?

