You know the crazy thing about this? For this application I think it’s similar to spam. AI can easily be trained to be better than a human.

And it’s definitely not a 0.05 percent difference. AI will perform better by a long shot.

Two reasons for this.

1. The AI is trained on better data. If the radiologist makes a mistake that mistake is identified later and then the training data can be flagged.

2. No human indeterminism. AI doesn’t get stressed or tired. This alone even without 1. above will make AI beat humans.

Let’s say 1. was applied but that only applies for consistent mistakes that humans make. Consistent mistakes are eventually flagged and shows up as a pattern in training data and the AI can learn it even though humans themselves never actually notice the pattern. Humans just know that the radiologists opinion was wrong because a different outcome happened, we don’t even have to know why it was wrong and many times we can’t know… just flagging the data is enough for the AI to ingest the pattern.

Inconsistent mistakes comes from number 2. If humans make mistakes that are due to stress the training data reflecting those mistakes will be minuscule in size and also random without pattern. The average majority case of the training data will smooth these issues out and the model will remain consistent. Right? A marker that follows a certain pattern shows up 60 times in the data but one time it’s marked incorrectly because of human error… this will be smoothed out.

Overall it will be a statistical anomaly that defies intuition. Similar to how flying in planes is safer than driving. ML models in radiology and spam will beat humans.

I think we are under this delusion that all humans are better than ML but this is simply not true. You can thank LLMs for spreading this wrong intuition.