I'm a doctor and I've been following this saga for a while. What you wrote does not match my experience. Firstly, you overestimate our political reach by a large margin. If you can have acceptable service for massively cheaper, it will happen regardless of any lobbying. What _is_ true, is that AI systems outperform docs for very select, often trivial situations (e.g. routine chest X-ray). I don't believe this would shrink the market for radiologists significantly. Secondly, the non-trivial work is exceedingly difficult to automate, because those cases currently have a prevalence to complexity ratio that make them impossible to train for. The US are making great strides towards that kind of thing, though. But not available yet.

If you're counting mammograms as routine chest X-rays, AI has been able to outperform and do this substantially cheaper since 2019.

Yet this is not an option for patients, and likely won't be in the next 10 years.

> Yet this is not an option for patients, and likely won't be in the next 10 years.

Happening in Austria since 2018-ish: https://contextflow.com/

The radiologist fee isn't even the majority of the cost of a mammogram in the US. There's a lot more to it that has nothing to do with any radiologist protectionism. AI outperforming on mammograms and a few other basic routine modalities and leading to conclude that this means the AI "outperforms" radiologists in general is like claiming programmers are obsolete because Makefiles can run build commands better. You don't even need AI for most automation. Somehow you still have a job.

As for Chest Xrays https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.231236 AI has not even demonstrated superiority outside of "routine".

Maybe revisit this in a decade. But your entire argument was that we still have radiologists because of protectionism (and the lawyer case isn’t any more load bearing either). Seems a bit uninformed and premature.

> AI has outperformed radiologists for a while now

Refer me to the evidence where AI is outperforming radiologists in the entire body of cross-sectional imaging. Are you seriously claiming that there is AI technology today that can take a brain MRI or CT A/P and produce a full findings and impression without human intervention? You have a reference for that?

Do you work in the medical industry? (To be Frank it sounds like you’re spewing bs about a topic you have no intimate knowledge of - seems rather naive actually).