Tag Archives: diagnostic radiology

Systems Thinking: What Doctors Do to Prepare for the AI Era

When people talk about preparing doctors for the AI era, the conversation often goes straight to tools: which model, which vendor, which use case. Those questions matter. But there is an earlier question that may be more useful: what kind of problem is this system actually presenting?

Medicine is full of problems that look similar from a distance and behave very differently up close. Treating each one as a technical problem is an easy way to create a technically impressive solution that does not improve much.

Continue reading

FDA AI Guidance and the Hard Part of Transparency

The least glamorous part of AI in radiology may turn out to be the most important: telling people what changed.

That sounds simple. It is not. A diagnostic AI tool may be trained on one dataset, validated on another, deployed inside a PACS or reporting workflow, monitored after release, and then updated when the model, threshold, input, interface, or intended environment changes. Somewhere in that chain, a radiologist is expected to decide whether to trust a box, a score, a contour, a triage flag, or a sentence.

Continue reading

The Radiologist’s Real Job Description

We often think of innovation as creating new technology, but innovation also comes in the form of new business models, new regulations, and new ways to perform a craft.  Radiologists are in crossroads among a myriad of such “news,” the more comprehensively discussed among which are the reimbursement changes and regulation changes which have been discussed ad infinitum (e.g. here, herehere, and more).

Rather than discussing the impact of the new healthcare regulations on radiology and the emerging high-tech, social-media-connecting, cloud-based, deep learning, big-data-supporting, iPad-friendly, segmentation-compatible solutions , maybe it is worthwhile to take a few minute to think about innovating at a much lower level.  On the level of our job description.

Photo Credit: debspoons; freedigitalphotos.net

Continue reading