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Comment by throwaway4220 | Hacker News Reader

“ Doctors in the US and UK are very expensive, that's not because nobody has noticed there are equally skilled doctors in other countries that charge 1/5th the price (or even algorithms that can do most of it for pennies). It's because practicing medicine in those countries requires to go through a regulatory gauntlet that would make Kafka feel like an unimaginative fraud.”

Ouch. Yeah some US/UK doctors are overpaid but the liability is not addressed. Also not sure what algorithms they are referring to. I don’t know any even in radiology/pathology that can rival a physician.

From my friends who work with outsourced programmers, this is also an issue in the coding world right? Who’s held responsible if something is not working or delivered?

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> go through a regulatory gauntlet

A lot of people like to point to regulations and licensing as a source of inefficiency, but in reality the lack of any sort of professional licensing around programming drives all sorts of alternate inefficiency: with no objective standard to measure applicants against, employers are stuck trying to make up their own, usually broken standards.

The lack of violently enforced standards doesn’t mean there are “no objective standards”, nor does violently enforcing a standard like they do in medicine make it an objective standard (see: how careless and dogmatic your typical MD is)

Agreed. For better or for worse there is a "standard of care" that is a solid legal basis for lawsuits and a lot of decision making stems from it. "It's what's in the textbooks and established, and I can't be sued for doing it."

But the flip side, using newer research, may fix incorrect/suboptimal diagnosis or treatment, but can also fail.

I'm of course sidestepping the "I'm an MD and am right, and you're a layperson and don't know medicine" mentality, but to be fair, there are fewer of these in the newer generation of MD/DO/healthcare providers.

> I don’t know any even in radiology/pathology that can rival a physician

You're saying this based on..?

I'm a radiologist involved in machine learning research! I lurk on HN to feel like I know how to code :)

Great! Then you're the ideal person to ask something I've been wondering: We see the occasional headline about machine learning algorithms outperforming human radiologists. What's the catch? I'm prepared to believe they aren't really outperforming humans once you take all the unstated factors into account, just wondering what the unstated factors are.

That's surprising, I was sure radiology would be the first medical field to get automated away. What are the main challenges you think?

Most people cite liability as the main reason but I also haven't seen any algorithm that reads chest radiographs better than radiologists. To be fair, rads look at images, correlate with the patient chart and symptoms, and that info is not provided to the algorithms. But also, humans need only one or two examples of a weird diagnosis to find it again and that still can't be tackled by one-shot/few shot learning algorithms (yet!).

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-ai-will-not-replace-radio...

This covers some points, but "never?" I'm not so sure about that... That's why if I can't beat 'em I'm trying to join em

I don't know enough about A.I or radiology but if A.I can drive cars or make investment decisions better than humans I can't see why something as technical as reading photos and recognising patterns can't be done by A.I. Good luck with your research!

The largest system in the human brain is the one responsible for vision. There's a scary amount of computational power involved in a human completing simple-seeming visual tasks, and that's not always easy to reproduce with computer models.

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