America's Largest Hospital System Ready to Start Replacing Radiologists With AI, Its CEO Says

Getty / Futurism Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you! Just weeks after the largest nurses strike in the New York City history, the CEO of NYC Health and Hospitals has a bold vision for a future where AI, not human radiologists, examines and diagnoses X-rays. At a panel held by Crain’s New York Business, Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of New York’s 11-hospital public benefit corporation, made overt gestures at his desire to replace highly trained radiology experts with visual language AI models, Radiology Business reported. “We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,” Katz said at the panel. One example he gave, according to Radiology, would affect women’s healthcare in particular, by automating breast cancer screening with AI tools. By sidelining radiologists until an AI system flags a reading as abnormal, Katz declared, hospitals could achieve “major savings.” Mohammed Suhail, a radiologist at North Coast Imaging in San Diego, told Radiology that Katz’s comments are “undeniable proof that confidently uninformed hospital administrators are a danger to patients,” and are “easily duped by AI companies that are nowhere near capable of providing patient care.” “Any attempt to implement AI-only reads would immediately result in patient harm and death, and only someone with zero understanding of radiology woul...