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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1338 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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radiologist

I recently got a cheap knee MRI at a local facility and wanted to double-check the radiologist's report and maybe learn something about how to read MRIs. So I uploaded the .zip of obscurely formatted images to Claude (highest-powered free model as of a week ago, on high setting) and asked for an opinion. It did a great job of parsing the file and coming up with a plausible-sounding stream of orthopedic gobbledegook, but failed to identify a partially torn quadriceps tendon, which was far and away the most significant finding in the radiologist's report and is generally consistent with symptoms and history. When I nudged it a little bit, it seemed to pick up on the quad tendon, but when I asked it to highlight the finding on the relevant frame it identified a random location on the IT band as the quad tendon. I wasn't quite sure myself at first, not having a ton of experience with either AI or reading MRIs, and I got Claude fairly confused by asking about the difference between sagittal and coronal before I figured out what was going on. (All this took several days, since I was hitting my token cap fairly quickly on high setting.). Super impressive natural language processing, but I'm not sold on its radiological abilities, and I seem to recall hearing quite a while ago that the days of human radiologists were numbered.

Yeah I am sure that AI will come for Radiologists and everyone else eventually but we are still far away. They aren't right all the time, and the expectation is you are right all the time for one (and when they are wrong they are sometimes wrong in the most basic of ways).

That says nothing about being about to talk to primary teams about the read, rare findings, and how to manage incidental findings, as well as other basic radiology tasks.

People want this fight to be over because they hate doctors or certain kinds of expense, but we aren't there yet.

I wonder how its radiological abilities compare to ultrasonic nondestructive testing analysis? Seems like a similar field, and I believe it was getting touted for the latter as well.

It looked like much of the skill of ultrasound specialists was in moving the device around to get the correct locations in real time, and then they would mark it off on their checklist, and a doctor would look at it later (but also they already have an opinion on morality in the moment). So an LLM could replace the analysis, but not the moving the device around while jostling the item being scanned (at least for pregnancies).

Yeah, I was thinking much more of the interpretation that the initial reading-taking.

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