Posted by engmarketer 4 hours ago
The LLM doesn’t need to be leading or whatever but then you can have a conversation with the patient. If their ChatGPT reports has differences it can be analyzed as well.
It feels like the time constraint of the 15m doctor sessions is the thing. But if prepared immediately after the scan then why not?
There is always time needed to factor in new developments and innovations and that’s fine. Just moving blindly work from human to LLM is wrong. But learning on and testing with all the ai tools incoming constantly won’t be a waste. There will be more and more tools in those processes outside of human judgement, better improve the workflows now to be able to test and plugin new models and systems when they are ready.
Because they don't exist, yet.
In the UK MRIs and other imaging systems need two opinions. there has been a move to allow the first opinion to be ML based.
The _problem_ is that you are basically doing grey smudge analysis, and thats fucking hard.
LLMs are the best PDF-to-markdown converters, in my experience. I have a CLI that converts PDF to PNG, then run a background agent to "read" each PNG and write it down as markdown; it works flawlessly even for complex math formulas, it can "translate" complex charts, graphs, and tables into words.
It's slow and arguably expensive compared to traditional OCR, but very effective and precise.
The finer detail (which you may already know) is more complicated.
MR does ‘2D’ scans which are a slice, then a gap of non-imaged tissue (typically 10% the slice thickness) then a slice. Each slice is an image with a number of pixels, say 320. Each pixel in the slice is small, eg 0.5mm but very thick due to the slice being thick, which is required for MRI signal. The pixels are 3mm in the shoulder scan done here.
‘3D’ scans don’t have a gap between slices, and are often isotopic, meaning the same resolution in all directions. The voxel (a pixel with depth) would be something like 1mm x 1mm x 1mm.
3D scans are slow, prone to movement artifact and never as pretty in plane as a good 2D. You can reformat them to look ok in any plane.
An AI telling you it could be X or Y because theory ABC… is the academic answer and a luxury clinicians don’t have. AI doesn’t give you what you want. I don’t see any added value in using generic AI models for this
And well, yes, I have the appropriate life science degrees to navigate clinical trial reports and research publications, and that was likely indispensable for steering Claude Code where it went, the radiologist's caution is merited here. But it's just not amateur hour for me to do this, it's 2 decades of academic research in my rearview mirror.
If the author would actually go for a second opinion (maybe bring along the AI to let it explain it's findings), then the article could read as "AI did MRI analysis and proved my doctor wrong" (or: "AI did MRI analysis and failed").
Many can get paid fee-for-service for after hours work, so would probably prefer that.