Axios interviews: AI for radiology

I recently zoomed with Aengus Tran, CEO of Harrison.ai. He was in ... Sydney, Australia. I was in Northern Virginia. You tell me which is cooler.

• Harrison.ai is working on making AI models that can read and interpret medical imaging. In his words, "The AI is like a spell checker for radiologists."
• One thing he said that caught my attention: When it comes to regulatory approvals, "The pace of clearing technology in the U.S. is significantly slower than the rest of the world."

We did our questions. You know the drill by now:

Q: What is transformative about what you are working on?

It is one of the, in my mind, one of the few and only solutions that can solve the capacity constraint in diagnostic medicine by using the AI as the scaling factor … we can't solve that by just training more doctors and radiologists. That would just take too long.

Q: One trend transforming health care that we're not paying enough attention to?

The biggest problem in health care at the moment is the capacity constraint and the lack of skilled clinicians. In order to significantly impact patient outcomes, AI has the potential to solve that by automating some of the most mundane and repetitive tasks and allowing doctors to focus more on the things that are uniquely human.

Biggest challenge health care faces?

There are two areas. Number one is advancing the frontier of medicines ... The other bucket of things in health care is what I call things we already know how to do, we just need to do it at dramatically higher scale.

In my mind, 80% is in the capacity issues, and 20% is that we don't know how to effectively treat certain diseases yet.

Biggest wild card?

The real wildcard here is what is that timing, and when will all of that happen? The vision is that AI will be generally reimbursed, where radiologists will read an x-ray…and if they use AI they get separately reimbursed … I think when that happens, it really is going to drive the adoptions much faster.

What's your go-to piece of advice?

Keeping it simple; there's a phrase that says sometimes when you can explain something simply is when you truly understand it.

What is your morning routine?

Outside of work, I'm an avid triathlete. I'm training for my Iron Man races in a couple of months...I typically get up at 6 and do up to two hours before the team gets up. But in exchange I go to sleep super early — I'm in bed by 8 or 9!

Coolest place you've ever worked from?

Nothing beats Bondi Beach, getting the sun in your face but still getting a lot of reading and work done.

Favorite piece of technology that you own?

I'm obsessed with my iPad mini. I have this thing where I've now given up my smartphone entirely...It's not too convenient that you would just pull it out in the coffee shop line and just be doom-scrolling. So it's helped me be a lot more intentional.