AUSTIN – Before AI came along, the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) seemed to be a conference in search of itself. SIIM (and before it, SCAR) built its reputation on education and training for radiology’s shift to digital image management.
But what happens when the dog catches the truck? Radiology eventually fully adopted digital imaging, and that meant less need to teach people about technology they were already using every day.
Fast forward to the AI era, and SIIM seems to have found its new mission. Once again, radiology is faced with a transformative IT technology that few understand and even fewer know how to put into clinical practice. With its emphasis on education and networking, SIIM is a great forum to learn how to do both.
That’s exemplified by the SIIM keynote address on Wednesday, by Ziad Obermeyer, MD, a physician and researcher in machine learning at UC Berkeley who has published important research on bias in machine learning.
While not a radiologist, Obermeyer served up a fascinating talk on how AI should be designed and adopted to have maximum impact. His advice included:
- Don’t design AI to perform the same tasks humans do already. Train algorithms to perform in ways that make up for the shortcomings of humans.
- Training algorithms on medical knowledge from decades ago is likely to produce bias when today’s patient populations don’t match those of the past.
- Access to high-quality data is key to algorithm development. Data should be considered a public good, but there is too much friction in getting it.
To solve some of these challenges, Obermeyer is involved in two projects, Nightingale Open Science to connect researchers with health systems, and Dandelion Health, designed to help AI developers access clinical data they need to test their algorithms.
The Takeaway
The rise of AI – particularly generative AI models like ChatGPT – has given SIIM a shot in the arm from a content perspective, and the return of in-person meetings plays to the conference’s strength as an intimate get-together where the networking and relationship-building is almost as important as the content. Please follow along with the proceedings of SIIM 2023 on our Twitter and LinkedIn pages.
