I think you're correct in the current context. However, this strikes me as a sign of some kind of paradigm shift waiting to happen, enabled by the reduced cost of data gathering, data processing, and improvements in AI.
There was a time when many things which are mass produced now were once handcrafted luxury items. Perhaps, as technology improves, it will one day be cost effective to take a whole body scan into account. I can imagine a day when an AI would digest the information from a full body scan, then autonomously plan robot keyhole surgery to take many of the biopsies.
It's certainly possible that more data would eventually let us avoid most invasive followups, that's nowhere near certain.
I think it's likely to happen in decades, if our civilization doesn't fall soon.
Perhaps, as technology improves, it
will one day be cost effective to
take a whole body scan into account.
That's the really funny thing about this: A colossal library of full-body imaging studies over time is exactly the kind of technology that would make that library useable. Think about Google 411 and similar projects: Voice recognition was unusable until people dumped a ton of money into bootstrapping the necessary datasets and now I talk to my phone every day. Similarly, I bet that a bunch of that "anomalies are indistinguishable on images" is solely because we don't have enough images about non-malignant anomalies over time. The data itself would be the technology that makes it usable.
I think you're correct in the current context. However, this strikes me as a sign of some kind of paradigm shift waiting to happen, enabled by the reduced cost of data gathering, data processing, and improvements in AI.
There was a time when many things which are mass produced now were once handcrafted luxury items. Perhaps, as technology improves, it will one day be cost effective to take a whole body scan into account. I can imagine a day when an AI would digest the information from a full body scan, then autonomously plan robot keyhole surgery to take many of the biopsies.
It's certainly possible that more data would eventually let us avoid most invasive followups, that's nowhere near certain.
I think it's likely to happen in decades, if our civilization doesn't fall soon.