Quote:
Originally Posted by mustafamond
diagnostics is a lot less like chess- its simpler, particularly reading x-rays, CTs, EKGs, pattern recog, med errors, and lab evaluation.
Yes a computer can outperform us on all this stuff, and we should take advantage of this.
Tonight I called the cath lab team and a cardiologist in emergently within five minutes of a guy arriving by ambulace with chest pain for what the computer read as a stone cold normal EKG. The EKG actually had some diffuse concave st elevation in all the anterior leads which could have been a normal variant called early repolorization but based purely on gestalt of looking at the patient I thought it was an acute myocardial infarction.
Guy had a 100% LAD lesion successfully stented by the cardiologist. His initial troponin was normal since he arrived twenty minutes after the pain started.
So we got a "normal" EKG and normal labs.
Computer would have killed him or at least left him a cardiac cripple when his second set of labs it ordered four hours later came back with a troponin of 200 and half his heart is dead.
I don't doubt all of you pointing out how sophisticated AI, Watson, etc is at this point.
My only contribution here is trying to point out that there seems to be quite a
bit of underestimation if how monumental the task is because most of the posters only experience in medicine seems to be the minor straightforward problems that the relatively young and healthy population here have.