This has come up before in similar contexts. Model based decision decisions tend to do better than clinicians alone or clinicians with the model based decision system in general. Despite this it’s been effectively impossible to deploy such systems in a clinical setting due to many issues but one is that clinicians aren’t willing to cede their ground and patients aren’t willing to believe the machine over a human.
granted, I feel like the training of some physicians also doesn't make them that good at diagnosis. Over time, intuitively understanding the narrative history of the illness/symptoms is key; that being said, nowadays, this sort of thing seems scattershot in some younger physicians.
Med schools tend to try and rejigger their curriculum frequently to try and justifiably make the experience friendlier and w/ less workload for the students, but sometimes, it backfires in terms of this.
I had an older school professor who liked to remark, in his day, no such thing as a differential diagnosis, just the right one and a bunch of wrong ones.
I don't see how those models couldn't be used to at least offer a second opinion. They are pretty cheap to run. I doubt patients would complain about that.
That surprised me as well. The case for humans being merely assisted by AI may not be the strongest one. It could be that they work better without human input, which is at the same time amazing and a bit frightening.
I hear internists talking about +LL and -LL all the time and I'd hope that reflected some higher degree of rationality when reasoning out diagnoses, but perhaps not?
It also outperforms clinician + googling which the study observed (many doctors use google search to help with diagnosis, terminology, recent studies, etc)
Makes sense. In many applications the ‘human in the loop’ will become the weakest link. Imagine giving alpha go to players as a suggested move assistant. Even the best players would have seen alpha go’s suggestions and thought they were an error. Can we eventually trust AI even if we can’t understand its reasoning?
Hossenfelder has been in Physics for more than 25 years and is a seasoned researcher and communicator. Her “academic rank” shouldn’t and in fact doesn’t have any bearing on her impact.
