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Comment by krapht | Hacker News Reader

"Using AI, it may be possible to capture less data and therefore scan faster, while preserving or even enhancing the rich information content of magnetic resonance images, says Facebook.

The key will be to train artificial neural networks to recognise the underlying structure of the images in order to fill in detail omitted from an accelerated scan."

Ah, right, what I want is for an ANN to invent information in a medical image. It's one thing to upscale textures in a game, but I can't see the use for this at all in a medical imaging device.

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I don't care what it has to do, it can be drawing pentagrams in blood for all I care, as long as it has even a fraction better health outcomes to unassisted doctors I'm all for it.

The point here is making people healthy, not providing some sort of validated theoretically clean design. If the rcts say it works, bring on the deep learning voodoo.

(edit: I, for the record, want to trust in average accuracy.)

This is not how trust works

You mean it's not enough to trust in average accuracy, you want trust in specific instances of application?

Averages are not adequate descriptions of situations with bizarre outliers. An ML model that creates nonexistent detail in a medical image screams bizarre outliers.

Medical conditions are usually binary choices.

The article is about faster scanning, not making a diagnosis.

Well, imagine a doctor having a suspicion of some kind, sending a patient to get scanned and an AI ignoring an anomaly and substituting it with an interpolation of normal tissue. The doctor looks at the result and thinks he might have been wrong and says to the patient that he is fine.

Even if it happens more rarely than a doctor missing an anomaly on the scan, it doesn't feel right. A patient had a good chance to be diagnosed and he wasn't.

What's more, in case of normal MRI a patient or a doctor can ask another doctor to have a look, but in case of AI and the fast scan described in the article, the AI's interpretation of data is final, unless you go make another scan, this time in the traditional way.

I think this is more a problem with your feeling than the actual process.

You're focusing on the person who got falsely detected as healthy, and are ignoring the people who would be correctly detected as unhealthy. That's why the important question is expected outcomes.

I don't really care whether the doctor gets to be morally culpable or not. I'm not sure why I would ever care about something like that as a patient. If I get sick and die, the fact that a person was responsible rather than an algorithm gives me precisely zero comfort.

You falsely believe that it is a binary choice. Cost-cutting allowed by this fast and creative scanning is not the only way to help more patients.

I'd assume (hope) they mean to infer data and not invent it.

It is clear to any mind of intelligence that you cannot give something less information and expect it to give you back better decisions.

Not only that you can - you have to do this to make better decisions. It's called focusing and everyone does it all the time.

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