Post by @markmetz@sfba.social

2026-09-29 11:50 UTC

“I'm truly just blown away by how little impact AI has had in our field, even when it comes to pure diagnostics. My hospital employs a limited number of "models" for basic tasks like pulmonary nodule detection, and even then they suck to such a point that I stopped using them early on in my residency. Beyond that, I have never heard of anything remotely approaching the point of analyzing CT, MR, US, PET, or catheter angiography accurately and producing a complete report. The technology is not just in "early stages"...it's plainly nonexistent. And the "cutting edge" research that I review ain't exactly making much progress (it's usually for much more banal bullshit, like fixing reporting errors, and triaging critical findings...which is all well and good, but only modestly impactful in the setting of a true clinical workflow).” more->

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@markmetz@sfba.social 2026-09-29 11:51

“In the meantime, some of the interviews with the billionaires are just mind numbing. Jensen Huan on Ezra Klein last week seemed to suggest that the task of automating our field had essentially been completed. Ross Douthat interviewing Dario Amodei claimed that it's well-established that AI can read a "scan" better than a radiologist. Don't forget Geoff Hinton saying in 2016 that AI would replace all radiologists in 5 years... These people have zero idea what we do. And If they have zero idea what WE do, then that means they've got zero idea what anyone else does. Rather than being the first ones to be replaced, I contend that we are canaries in the coal mine for this technology and why it will not wreak the havoc that our billionaire overlords are hoping to scare everybody into. They are just too far removed and self-satisfied to realize how incorrect their predictions are. Not to mention how useless their technology is in the real world when lives are at stake.” more ->

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