Technology

Devil's advocate...this is one of the few good opportunities for ML. If you train a model on a specific dataset with expert validation, this has the opportunity to save lives.

First, radiology isn't one thing; different radiologists with different expertise looking at the same imaging can see different things. Second, there are not enough radiologists; my wife is an ER doctor who only does overnights and her hospital network has a central radiology center that reviews all films from all the hospitals, and it's always backlogged and waiting on results impacts outcomes in a real way. Third, there are simply human limits to what we can visually perceive, take a look at this study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3964612/

Radiological ML models could change healthcare. Imagine a world where part of your annual preventative care you go and get a full body CT. The ML model can compare your CT with references in your demographics AND your prior years, and find changes/issues before they're crises. That's simply not an amount of data analysis that could be done by an army of radiologists, and has the opportunity to spot things like tumors or organ swelling way earlier. I get that the late stage capitalism reality is "they'll use the data to farm money out of you" but from an actual technological standpoint, this could have real life-saving and improving implications for a lot of people and removes a huge bottleneck in healthcare.