An artificial intelligence model from the Mayo Clinic detected abnormalities on scans up to three years before patients were diagnosed. It's being evaluated in a clinical trial.
    • Thorry@feddit.orgEnglish
      1 hour

      Agreed, this is exactly what reinforcement learning and neural networks are good at. Calling them AI is beyond dumb, but hey marketing will be marketing. It’s pattern recognition, which is cool, but nobody would call that intelligent otherwise. Another big issue with the marketing is they only report on the success rate and not the failure rate. Doctors praise the cases being caught, but dislike the models pointing out stuff that is clearly not a tumor. It wastes time for people already short on time. These models also risk doctors becoming over reliant on them, even though they can have serious blind spots and thus miss stuff a doctor would have caught. Or the other way around, have people receive treatment (often not without risk, discomfort and cost to the patient), where none was needed. The thing that bothers me the most is how it’s always framed as a win for AI. Like see AI is good at diagnosing cancer (which then gets extrapolated to curing cancer for some bizarre reason), so that useless chat bot is also good somehow. Because AI.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6 hours

    That’s particularly useful for pancreatic cancer, if it’s accurate, reliable, cost effective, and practical in the real world.

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 hours

      It’s not, though and that’s the issue.

      False positives are at least as dangerous as false negatives and AI solutions like this have massive problems with over diagnosing.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 hour

        False positives are at least as dangerous as false negatives and AI solutions like this have massive problems with over diagnosing.

        Absolutely 100% wrong.

        In pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a false positive means a follow-up scan. A false negative means death, the 5-year survival is near zero once it’s caught late, but exceeds 80% when caught early.

        In the study, the radiologists’ lower false positive rate is achieved by missing 78% of cancers. That’s not a safer trade-off, it’s just a different way to fail. “Overdiagnosis” also requires a disease that might not have harmed the patient, PDA doesn’t have a harmless form. Every missed case is a lost life while every false positive is an extra doctor’s appointment.

        This system detects twice as many cancers and was flagging them, on average, 675 days (nearly 2 years!) before clinical detection.

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6 hours

      In other words: not useful at all. (Didn’t read the article because it already misuses the AI acronym in the title, indicating it was written by some idiot with nothing to say)

      • ivan@piefed.socialEnglish
        5 hours

        Article actually describes it well enough, how scientists trained a model on data from CT scans of patients who were treated for other conditions some time before being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5 hours

          In my first sentence, I was referring to the combination of adjectives in the question by previous commentor. No one in today’s health care systems is gonna pay preemptive screenings for saving peasant lives like yours or mine.

          • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
            5 hours

            There are healthcare systems in the world other than the one in the usa

            • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
              49 minutes

              Yes, but all of them are worsening in the interests of profit, in case you weren’t following the news. Germany is just scrapping skin cancer prevention, thanks to our corrupt fucks in government.

          • Alex@lemmy.mlEnglish
            5 hours

            If course you do - if the cost of treating the patient down the line is going to cost you more. Public health systems have a vested interest in healthier citizens.

            • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
              45 minutes

              The thing is providers of care like to make a profit though, and profit = money = influence on healthcare policies. Healthcare policies are not made solely with cost efficiency in mind, but rather to redistribute wealth from insurance payers to those who provide services. If that means a couple ten thousand of us peasants die a preventable death, then that’s a sacrifice they are willing to make.

            • saimen@feddit.orgEnglish
              4 hours

              Problem is they are probably from the US which doesn’t really have a public healthcare system.

              • jqubed@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3 hours

                Even in the US with private health insurance, those providers will pay for screenings that can save costs by catching something early. Sometimes that might be legally mandated, other times it’s based on cost/benefit. It all varies from plan to plan, but the more common a disease is the more likely they’ll pay for at least a low-cost initial screening.

      • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6 hours

        You used the AI acronym in the same way, so I’m confused by your arrogant sounding statement

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5 hours

          Did I though? Are they using a model with any kind of abstraction layer that actually understands relationships between objects?