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Lydiafae t1_jb4rna6 wrote

Reply to comment by rogert2 in Artificial intelligence could soon be widely used to detect breast cancer — and may be more effective than doctors at doing so, study says by Gari_305

It also tracks that many doctors minimize or dismiss women's health issues. AI would prevent more of this bias, which would lead to more accurate health diagnostic metrics. Which I am all for given my personal experience.

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ixM t1_jb5n6qp wrote

This is wrong. Because datasets are collected by humans they suffer from lots of different biases that are really hard to identify and remove. It's becoming a huge research topic.

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rogert2 t1_jb7pd81 wrote

I don't think that "doctors dismissing patients concerns" is a source of failure to detect breast cancer via mammograms.

I assume women generally get mammograms because health experts recommend regular checks for all women. The reason radiologists fail to detect breast cancer in some x-rays is not that they aren't taking women seriously, because the women weren't coming in with symptoms or complaints -- they came in for a preventative screening. Radiologists sometimes fail to detect breast cancer because each radiologist looks at thousands of essentially identical x-rays over their career, breast cancer is uncommon, and cancer that does exist is hard to visually recognize in its early stages.

I'm not saying that people don't dismiss the complaints of women, whether in a healthcare or other context. But that's not what's going on here, because breast cancer checks are generally driven by prevention rather than symptoms.

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