The chief executive of America’s largest public hospital system — NYC Health + Hospitals — recently said that he is prepared to start replacing radiologists with artificial intelligence (AI) in some circumstances. His statement comes with the disclaimer that once the regulatory landscape catches up. Mitchell H Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals made the comments during a panel discussion held by Crain’s New York Business. One example he gave, as reported by Radiology, would affect women’s healthcare in particular, by automating breast cancer screening with AI tools. By sidelining radiologists until an AI system flags a reading as abnormal, Katz declared, hospitals could achieve “major savings.”He spoke about how AI is increasingly being used to interpret mammograms and X-rays. “We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,” Katz said at the forum. Katz said that he sees great potential for AI to increase access to breast cancer screening. He asked his fellow hospital CEOs if there is any reason why they shouldn’t be pushing for changes to New York state regulations, allowing AI to read images “without a radiologist”. Crain’s reported. The discussion comes after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently made similar statements about AI replacing radiologists. In a podcast interview, he claimed that AI has taken over the specialty’s core function, allowing doctors to focus more on the human side of the job.‘What Nvidia and Anthropic CEOs are doing is storytelling’Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang too made similar comments that have not gone well with the medical community. While talking about AI at the US-Saudi Investment Forum, Huang said: “One thing that I will say, give you some evidence, is that, and I was just telling Elon about this earlier, radiology, for example, has largely been converted to AI-driven radiology. And there’s some really great companies doing that. And the surprising thing is the prediction that all radiologists would be the first jobs to go was exactly the opposite. The trend shows that there are more radiologists being hired now as a result of AI.”Doctor Ben White, who is a neuroradiologist, has slammed both in long blogs. He called Huang’s views “sheer unadulterated fiction.” White wrote, “Leave aside the fuzziness of what “AI-driven radiology” might mean; AI simply doesn’t drive a meaningful part of the radiology workflow. Some AI list triage and a few algorithms to detect intracranial blood or fractures have not changed the game in even the slightest of ways. The only thing that has been in meaningful if still limited use over the past few years that has arguably driven even small efficiency gains is generative AI for drafting impressions based on dictated findings.”As for Amodei, White termed his views “ignorance”. “It’s always dangerous to assume malevolence over incompetence/ignorance. That said, Dario Amodei is worth $7 billion on paper, with Anthropic raising money on a valuation of something like $380 billion. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I’m starting to think he, Jensen Huang, and others know it’s not true but feel it’s the storytelling they need. This radiology “example” has become such a common talking point that I’m beginning to doubt that all the AI guys don’t know better. I’m not even entirely sure which explanation (untruth vs ignorance) I prefer.”
