
Kheiron raises $22M for AI that helps radiologists detect cancer earlier - techlad84
https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/23/kheiron-raises-22-million-for-machine-learning-that-helps-radiologists-detect-cancer-earlier/
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gtirloni
I think medicine is the one area where I think AI is/will have tangible
results like this to augment (not replace) humans. So much information is
hidden is these exams that a computerized pair of eyes could help sort
through. And it doesn't need to be "pure AI" or anything resembling the
singularity to have very good results.

I'm clearly contrasting these news with all the other stuff I hear about
personal assistants and social media.

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bilbo0s
Problem with AI in medicine, and in radiology in particular, is an inability
to discover things it's not trained on.

The issue with AI systems that I've seen and evaluated, (and I've seen just
about all of the best ones), is that they are good at finding what a
radiologist would find, with the added benefit of finding a few that a
radiologist would miss.

Here's the problem, AI finds a few that _" A"_ radiologist would miss, but
multiple radiologists would not miss. What I mean by that is that the nature
of the misses are somewhere between 'facepalm' and 'other radiologists give
rad that missed pathology a slap upside head'. Essentially, the pathology that
the AI found but the rad missed is obvious, and the rad says, "Oh yeah! I
should have caught that." The sort of misses that might be caused by fatigue,
or flipping through too many studies too quickly.

What you really want is AI that can synthesize a set of studies and catch
things that 99.999% of radiologists on the planet would _never_ catch.
Essentially, things not reflected in the datasets, and things that have not
been discovered. You need that because most delivery facilities already
outsource image reading to a centralized radiology reading facility that may
be miles away. So, financially, they are already saving the money of not
paying radiologists. So any centralized radiology reading facility powered by
AI, would need to be better than any centralized radiology reading facility
powered by humans.

Despite claims made everywhere from papers at RSNA to marketing materials from
Silicon Valley, every AI I've seen has failed this test. In both accuracy, as
well as the more esoteric metric of finding things that it's not trained on.

[Just as a matter of full disclosure, I have a research background in medical
imaging, and have actually had a startup exit in the field.]

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zelly
You just need a robot that's 80% as good as a radiologist. That means you
don't have to pay the bottom 80% of radiologists anymore.

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gtirloni
I don't think it's about costs here. No hospital in their right mind would
trust an AI completely to not have to pay for a radiologist. It's more about
augmenting their work.

