I don’t care for the term “Robot Doctor” but blame that on the person who writes headlines for the New York Times. The following are excerpts from an op-ed piece (PDF) by Dr. Pranav Rajpurkar (see comment below) and Dr. Eric Topol of that asserts “a growing body of research suggests that A.I. is outperforming doctors, even when they use it as a tool.”
A recent M.I.T.-Harvard study examined how radiologists diagnose potential diseases from chest X-rays. The study found that when radiologists were shown A.I. predictions about the likelihood of disease, they often undervalued the A.I. input compared to their own judgment. The doctors stuck to their initial impressions even when the A.I. was correct, which led them to make less accurate diagnoses. Another trial yielded a similar result: When A.I. worked independently to diagnose patients, it achieved 92 percent accuracy, while physicians using A.I. assistance were only 76 percent accurate — barely better than the 74 percent they achieved without A.I.
The solution, we believe, is a deliberate division of labor. Instead of forcing both human doctors and A.I. to review every case side by side and trying to turn A.I. into a kind of shadow physician, a more effective approach is to let A.I. operate independently on suitable tasks so that physicians can focus their expertise where it matters most.
