Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Crowdsourcing Radiology Reads


Outrageous it may sound but the thought has been around on the web for some time now. There are some people who are of opinion that Image interpretation  is one aspect of medicine that may sometime be read by collective intelligence.  Have seen patients in the past who have some uncommon disease and they have done their own research on the internet about their disease and its radiological findings, and in turn they are sometimes able to do a better job than overworked unaware radiologist.  Probably this may lead to some way of crowd sourcing-  may be in future we might have patients putting up their images minus the identification on this crowd sourcing portal and have everybody comment on the images, they may other patients with similar diseases, Doctors, radiologists in other countries and help them reach to final conclusions. Something like Wikipedia versus Peer review journals, i rely more on Peer reviewed material, but i find myself on wikipedia more often whenever i am  looking  for something and i usually get the information. I am not sure of the legal implications though and it may just become an aid to the patient’s quest for diagnosis. 

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think this would happen in near future?

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