AI Promised To Revolutionize Radiology but so far its Failing

AI will only get better, not worse, so it seems reasonable to suppose that in the not-too-distant future it will be useful, at the very least as aid to radiologists. A lot of work has to get into making any system be useful in practice, but there’s lots and lots of money in radiology so I’d think that someone could be put on the job of building a useful tool.

Here’s an analogy to a much simpler, but still not trivial, problem. Nearly twenty years ago some colleagues and I came up with improved analysis of serial dilution assays. The default software on these lab machines was using various seat-of-the-pants statistical methods that were really inefficient, averaging data inappropriately and declaring observations “below detection limit” when they were actually carrying useful information. We took the same statistical model that was used in that software and just fit it better.