AI helps radiologists detect bone fractures:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is an effective tool for fracture detection that has potential to aid clinicians in busy emergency departments, according to a study in Radiology.
Missed or delayed diagnosis of fractures on X-ray is a common error with potentially serious implications for the patient. Lack of timely access to expert opinion as the growth in imaging volumes continues to outpace radiologist recruitment only makes the problem worse.
AI may help address this problem by acting as an aid to radiologists, helping to speed and improve fracture diagnosis.
[...] Dr. Kuo cautioned that research into fracture detection by AI remains in a very early, pre-clinical stage. Only a minority of the studies that she and her colleagues looked at evaluated the performance of clinicians with AI assistance, and there was only one example where an AI was evaluated in a prospective study in a clinical environment.
"It remains important for clinicians to continue to exercise their own judgment," Dr. Kuo said. "AI is not infallible and is subject to bias and error."
Journal References:
Rachel Y. L. Kuo, Conrad Harrison, Terry-Ann Curran, et al. Artificial Intelligence in Fracture Detection: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Radiology (DOI: 211785)
Jérémie F. Cohen, Matthew D. F. McInnes. Deep Learning Algorithms to Detect Fractures: Systematic Review Shows Promising Results but Many Limitations, Radiology (DOI: 212966)
(Score: 4, Touché) by FuzzyTheBear on Friday April 01 2022, @07:16PM (2 children)
No amount of AI can save doctors from making mistakes. I arrive at a hospital in ambulance with a broken foot. Can't walk .. thing is like just mush , so on with the morphine we go. Go pass x rays and a scan .. well .. when i actually saw what they actually were scanning i started to laugh and asked the doc be called in in haste. They were examining the knee instead of the foot. On the form , the two are besides each other. All the same .. they checked the foot .. found 3 bones broken and started treatment. All the same .. if you ain't looking at the right place , even AI won't save you . Good weekend everyone.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday April 01 2022, @09:44PM
I'm more worried about unintended consequences [youtu.be] of the AI's approach to treatment in ambiguous situations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2022, @07:42PM
Similar happened to me c.1980. Tripped on a chair leg and a small toe was dislocated, the bone displaced upwards relative to original position. It was swollen when I got to the emergency room for x-rays. They x-rayed straight down on my toes, and at 90 deg sideways (all the toes stacked up in the image). They didn't see the dislocation at all.
A week later the swelling was down, it was obvious to me something was still wrong so I had it x-rayed again, this time at a dedicated imaging clinic. The operator was much sharper, he used a strip of gauze to pull that toe up out of the plane of all the other toes and the dislocation was obvious in the side view (elevation?) I wish the x-ray tech at the emergency room was that smart/thorough...
Unfortunately for me, everything had already knit in place. Painful efforts to re-break, so the original joints could be re-located were unsuccessful, so I've got a toe with less joints and a bump on top.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 01 2022, @07:17PM
Computer says amputate. So we gonna amputate.
Seriously tho, this is actually a good use for AI. Properly trained, a CNN can come up with filters highly optimized to recognize specific features. In mammography I saw they are training the CNN on images acquired 6mo before a human could detect anything, and it worked amazingly well. That's real.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday April 01 2022, @08:47PM (6 children)
It's pattern recognition, based on feeding thousands of patterns to it.
Not to say It's Not A Good Thing (tm), but intelligence it ain't
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 01 2022, @09:12PM (5 children)
Isn't pattern recognition based on thousands of examples what humans do?
But then I suppose most humans don't qualify as intelligent either.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday April 01 2022, @09:20PM (2 children)
Your doctor will decide it's a sprain. Your AI will decide it's African ubfukd disease.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Friday April 01 2022, @09:33PM (1 child)
Is that Ubuntu's new systemd replacement?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2022, @12:14AM
My new systemd replacement is FreeBSD.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday April 02 2022, @10:36AM
A calculator is "Artificial Intelligence" because it can do arithmetic and so can humans.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2022, @01:21PM
Yes, pattern matching is more or less the basis for intelligence. It's more or less what experience is. There's then higher levels of intelligence involved with improvisation and generation of novel approaches based on prediction, but most of the time, you don't need a new solution, there already an effective one.
Pattern matching is literally what the subconscious mind does. Without that, the brain literally couldn't prices information fast enough to keep up.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 02 2022, @12:36AM
Docs look at x-ray for bone fracture. It's an analog black-and-white image if the bone actually "broke" - it's a practiced art that older, more experienced surgeons teach their younger colleagues.
Remember, kids - the modern medicine is still more an art than science, a lot more than physical science/engineering for variety of reasons.