re: Are the ROAD specialities still the best in medicine?

Plastic surgery. Dermatology. No call and you do not have to take care of Medicaid and those without insurance who can't pay.

I believe there's a limit to what algorithms can accomplish with respect to interpreting medical images. Sure, some pathologies may be easy to identify, or at least flag as a probable pathology, but software will not replace radiologists. I'll grant that it will aid them in being more efficient--that's a no brainer. But software has it limits.

And I am not a radiologist and do not plan to become one.

edit: and I don't doubt that some folks at Google or MIT would laugh at my skepticism, but I don't really care. Their confidence doesn't give them foresight.

There's something called computer-aided detection (CAD) in breast imaging (which is much simpler than cross-sectional stuff of the brain/thorax/etc).

Guess how helpful it is? Radiologists ignore it, it's awful.

There's zero chance computers replace radiologists. Zero.

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This is a common reaction from those who have devoted themselves to the healthcare field.

Go talk to a few of the engineers at Google or MIT about this topic, and you'll find them laughing as well - but only because of how foolish it is to be in denial of this inevitability.

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Let's just assume you are right. I'm not so sure, but let's say you are:

1. You suppose Google is going to open themselves up to that sort of liability? The computer will have to be perfect.

2. What kind of computing needs to you suppose are going to be needed? You suppose a small suburban hospital is going to be able to afford this technology?

3. I would also bet there is going to be long vetting process with several multi-center clinical trials of any such technology before it unleashed on the general public.