Luke Oakden-Rayner
lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2016
Luke Oakden-Rayner is a radiologist and deep learning researcher who writes about medical AI, imaging datasets and evaluating machine learning in healthcare.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it as a skeptical, informed view on machine learning in medical imaging, since he is a radiologist first; posts on doctors versus machines and Covid CT are cited.
40HN people shared it
11linked it in comments
39stories submitted
430story points
5 years agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1.98 AUC classifying race from chest x-rays (external validation)9 people · 47 points · first shared 2021 · 15 comments on HN
- 2Do machines actually beat doctors? (2016)5 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 3Producing simple text descriptions for AI interpretability in radiology4 people · 19 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 4Exploring the ChestXray14 dataset: problems3 people · 9 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 5The Bleeding Edge of Medical AI Research3 people · 7 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 6CT scanning is just awful for diagnosing Covid-193 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 7Predicting Medical AI in 20172 people · 80 points · first shared 2017 · 10 comments on HN
- 8The End of Human Doctors – The Bleeding Edge of Medical AI Research (Part 3)2 people · 24 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9The End of Human Doctors – Understanding Medicine2 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 10The medical AI floodgates open, at a cost of $1000 per patient2 people · 7 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 11The End of Human Doctors: Radiology Escape Velocity2 people · 5 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 12Do machines actually beat doctors? (2017)2 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 13The end of human doctors understanding automation2 people · first shared 2017
- 14The end of human doctors introduction2 people · first shared 2017
- 15AI competitions don’t produce useful models1 people · 199 points · first shared 2019 · 62 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
vladTheInhaler · 2020-07-30
For another perspective on applying machine learning to medical imaging, I recommend the blog of Luke Oakden-Rayner[1]. He's a radiologist first, so he's in a great position to bring some well-needed skepticism to the conversation. I learned about a lot of complications that I never would have imagined as a lay-person.
[1] https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/
pak · 2017-05-17
I found the Statistical Learning self paced course on Stanford's site to be a great formal intro to ML algorithms implemented in R, and it is taught by the inimitable Hastie and Tibshirani: http://statlearning.class.stanford.edu
This post on ML in medicine is a pretty good overview of everything that has been going on recently and the nuances often lost in the current hype: https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do-computers-already…
rrherr · 2017-04-03
I recommend reading "Do machines actually beat doctors?" by Dr. Luke Oakden-Rayner, who is both a radiology doctor and deep learning researcher.
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do-computers-already…
heinrichf · 2020-04-07
See this blog post from a radiologist and ML researcher: https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/ct-scanning-is-just-…
joe_the_user · 2019-12-31
Everyone swooning with optimism over this result should the machine learning reddit comments on it first.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/ehpllt/deep_learning…
And also linked blog[edit]:
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/do-machines-actually…
TL;DR; There are sooo many subtlties to stuff like this that this things really shouldn't be taken at face value. This is far from replacing doctors in anything.
nestorD · 2018-08-27
I think there is hope, there is a very nice paper where they automaticaly produce both heatmaps and textual explanations of the label given by the neural network (used to detect and classify fractures).
It is detailled here :
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/explain-yourself-mac…
epmaybe · 2018-01-06
I appreciate this radiologist and current ML PhD student's perspective, as a trainee myself: https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/the-end-of-human-doc…
nopinsight · 2017-11-16
A high-quality blog series by Luke Oakden-Rayner, a radiologist (MD) who is doing a PhD focusing on applying machine learning to medical images and text.
The End of Human Doctors:
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/the-end-of-human-doc…
lukeor · 2017-01-23
Hi, I'm the author of the blogpost (didn't expect to see it here!) and I largely agree with you.
I think I would say that the use of private datasets isn't actually a problem though, the problem is that the methods and analysis in many of the papers is horribly flawed. I could reasonably trust a paper with good methodology - all of medical research is on private data essentially. But the majority is, as you say, pure hype.
I actually wrote another blog post a bit back that was popular on some simple rules to separate hype from reality in medical AI work - https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do-computers-already…
hgial · 2021-09-14
It might be helpful for folks to look at the blog post written by one of the authors:
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/ai-has-the-worst-sup…
or the paper itself
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.10356.pdf
I see a lot of "oh it's probably just picking up on x y z" when x, y, and z are things they explicitly checked for:
1) "It's probably just the names or other metadata" – they only gave it pixel data to train on. To control for things like metadata overlaid on the image (e.g., a name written on the image) they divided the images into 3x3 sections and trained classifiers on each section separately.
2) "It's probably some artifact of how the hospital marked up the images" – they used something like 7 different datasets from different hospitals and different modalities (X-Ray and CT).
If it is cheating somehow, it's not doing it in an obvious way that you can think of in a minute or two. Also note that they had more than just medical folks working on the paper; the author list includes plenty of computer scientists. It's unlikely they're making an elementary ML mistake here.
Mathnerd314 · 2017-05-27
It's not really a doctor shortage, more like a service shortage: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/upshot/a-doctor-shortage-lets-take-…
Generally, there's an ongoing reformation of the system. From the perspective of medical insurance, the current medical system is actually too lax, in that it certifies and retains doctors who get frequent malpractice suits. http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11… http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/833141
The solution to that seems like better data on health care (utilization, treatment outcomes, etc.) and accessible analytics (databases for professionals, patients, providers, etc.) and automation of complex/risky procedures/tests (deskilling). But those take time and effort and investments, which have been made but aren't finished/stable yet (somewhere in the middle of Gartner's hype cycle). http://sloanreview.mit.edu/case-study/when-healthcare-gets-a-healthy-d… http://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/using-doctor-ratings-sites https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/the-end-of-human-doc…
> What would it take to make it 290?
Once people start trusting the system again (which they don't, currently: http://www.hhnmag.com/articles/7802-the-trust-chasm-in-healthcare-anal… it might be possible to charge more for services and hence employ more people. But they wouldn't be physicians, the generic trend…