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Oh I know well how doctors don’t do the things they teach us to do in medical school! But it did seem like one thing that they can’t (that easily) but we can (relatively easily), due to it being more of a physical and tactile thing.
That said, I find that I do examine people at least a few times a day.
I agree it’s hardly impossible but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t markedly harder to train?
I didn't realize you were a doctor too, or I'd have elaborated further! For example, humans have fine touch, pressure and proprioception right? That's how we feel a lump below all the subcutaneous tissue.
My Google-fu has failed me, and I can't find the video in question, but over a year or two ago, I saw a demonstration of a robot that's learned to do the same, identify and outline objects through pressure alone without visual imaging.
They took a hard object and embedded it within gel that had the same consistency as human tissue, and then the robot used pressure sensors to accurately identify the foreign object without directly touching or visualizing it.
The only reason we don't see that being done in clinical practise or in robotic surgery is because humans can do it themselves, or because by the time someone ends up on the operating table you don't need to palpate at all anymore. It's not an insurmountable problem!
That’s quite impressive!
That still leaves a few problems with things like kidney ballotment (where there’s kind of a manual dexterity and a proprioception issue, both of which are apparently difficult for computers iirc) or correctly registering tenderness etc, but if robot tactile sensation is already close to there, those seem small potatoes in comparison (esp. if you can get a model to read both the tactile data plus monitor facial expressions etc). Not to mention that such silly techniques like kidney ballotment would probably get phased out with superior robot-powered assessment that can look at a million other things without doing something like that. I’m a convert!
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It's harder to train in the sense that there's less data for grounding. On the other hand, we can cheaply make robot fingertips with superhuman tactile resolution, and if anyone bothered, it'd be easy to train a model (riding on top of some multimodal LM, probably?) on general tactile recognition in reality and simulation, and then finetune it in the clinical setting. This isn't very different from how humans are trained. How many hours of palpation did you do in your life? It's a minor addition to your general manual skill. And even if sample efficiency turns out to be abysmal in comparison, two hundred hands at $1000 a pop, over a year, do not amount to even one American GP's compensation. Granted, proper hands are for now much more expensive, mostly due to small-scale production (which in turn is explained by worthless software), but I expect this to be solved rapidly once Tesla Optimus, 1X and other robots enter the market.
Actually sounds like a cool project for the developing world (@self_made_human, what do you think?). Might even increase the diagnostic value of tactile assessment. Too bad we can't have nice things.
I expect to be (un?)pleasantly surprised, but how well do you think robots (now, or will in the near future) integrate proprioceptive input and movement with tactile data?
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I think your attempt to ping me failed somehow, I had to dig down to find this.
In terms of utility in the 3rd world, I would wager that the reason more investment hasn't been made into tactile medical robotics is because of how redundant palpation etc have become in the modern age of imaging. Back in the day, they simply didn't have anything better, and now, due to both technical advances and fear of litigation, it's only used as a screening tool before actual investigations like xrays or USGs.
I would think in the contexts where you managed to setup a clinic with robots that could do touch assessments, it wouldn't be particularly hard to just have a token human do the same. If such functionality came downstream of other useful things such a bot could do, that might work, but the need for a robot that purely does palpation seems rather limited to me.
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