Hacker News Reader

Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

Depending how the costs of AI detection vs doctor, that genuinely might be enough to shift the math and be a net positive. If it is cheap enough to test 10x the current tested population, which would have lower, but non-zero rates of breast cancer, then[0] AI would result in more cancer detected and therefore more aggregate lives saved.

[0]presumptively

View on HN

Given that every positive case needs to be verified by a doctor anyway because the patient has breast cancer, and every negative case has to be checked because it does a worse job than traditional methods... It only costs more.

Depends on the false positive rate. Hypothetically one can 'just' tune the model so false positives are low. This will increase false negatives but those are 'free' as they don't require follow ups. So long as the decrease in cost per real positive[0] goes down there's a benefit to be had.

[0] accounting for false positives, screening costs for true negatives, etc. etc.

> This will increase false negatives but those are 'free' as they don't require follow ups.

Increase in false negative rate significantly reduces survival rate and increases cost of treatment. We have huge multiplication factor here so decreasing false negative rate is the net positive option at relatively low rates.

> Depending how the costs of AI detection vs doctor, that genuinely might be enough to shift the math and be a net positive.

Based on my very superficial medical understanding, screening is already the cheap part. But every false-positive would lead to a doctor follow up at best and a biopsy at worst. Not to mention the significant psychological effects this has on a patient.

So I would counter that the potential increase of false-positive MRI scans could be enough to tip off the scale to make screening less useful

Reply on news.ycombinator.com