Amy Avakian, MD @awkdocradi

I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be serving as Guest Editor for an upcoming Special Issue on ConductScience.org titled: “Advancing Radiology Through Data Standards and AI Integration.” This project means a lot to me. It bridges everything I care about in radiology: open data, clinical applications, human-centered innovation, and patient-radiologist connection✨ Supported by the NIH and NSF, ConductScience is reimagining what publishing can look like, where every article connects directly to its data, making radiology more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) by design. We’re calling for innovative work in AI, machine learning, and data interoperability that makes radiology more connected, transparent, and clinically actionable with open-access fees fully waived for this issue. If you’re working on something that pushes radiology forward, I’d love to feature your work or collaborate. 📩 [email protected] ConductScience.org #Radiology #AI #MedicalImaging #Informatics #FAIRData #OpenAccess #MachineLearning #DataStandards #AcademicPublishing

8/ Want to dive deeper into this study’s methodology and detailed results? Read the full paper here: stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/medag…

OHBM Australia invites you to join our upcoming webinar: Artificial Intelligence in Neuroimaging: Methods, Opportunities, and Challenges Date: Thursday, 30th October, 2025 Time: 4:00-5:00 PM AEST Click here to register: unimelb.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

Grateful to have been a co-keynote speaker at the Society of Abdominal Radiology’s Medical Student Outreach Seminar! Always excited to share how AI is transforming radiology and to see future radiologists so engaged in tech-driven medicine. @shuhanhemd #Radiology #SAR

Join us TOMORROW, October 11, at 1:00PM ET for a dynamic hands-on webinar with the SAR Medical Student Outreach committee! Learn More + Secure Your Spot Now: buff.ly/uJHTkA4 #SAR #SARMO #abdominalradiology

amsa.org/learn/machinel…

linkedin.com/events/opensci…

🔴AI and the Architecture of Anti-Intelligence The other day, I found myself at the center of an unexpected controversy. I suggested that large language models may not represent artificial intelligence at all, but something more disorienting, what I called anti-intelligence. Not stupidity, but an inversion of intelligence. It's a system that doesn’t just differ from human cognition, but stands in opposition to it. It's not a mirror, but a kind of cognitive counterfeit that's fluent, convincing, and fundamentally ungrounded or tethered to our humanity. This framing struck a nerve. Because we’re beginning to confuse coherence with comprehension. And it's this confusion that may be quietly rewriting how we think, how we decide, and even how we define intelligence itself. 📍What Is Anti-Intelligence? Anti-intelligence is not the failure to know. It’s the performance of knowing without understanding. It’s language divorced from memory, context, or intention. Large language models aren’t stupid; they’re structurally blind. They don’t know what they’re saying, and more importantly, they don’t know that they’re saying. It’s not that they lack intelligence in a conventional sense. It’s that they operate on an entirely different architecture that's based on prediction, not perception. And it's worth saying again, they don’t form thoughts, they pattern-match them. This is the paradox that is worthy of our human cognitive capabilities. The systems we call intelligent are not building knowledge. They’re building the appearance of knowledge that is often indistinguishable from the real thing until we ask a question that requires judgment, reflection, or grounding in reality. Or perhaps even a simple non-sequitur that ends up as a monkey wrench in the system. Read on and you'll see what I mean. 📍The Cognitive Divide, Visualized To understand the difference more clearly, I thought that we could frame this visually. My attempt here, still early thinking, tries to build a framework that accounts not just for performance, but for the configuration of thought. A map, not a spectrum where human and machine cognition occupy fundamentally different quadrants. A map, not a spectrum where human and machine cognition occupy fundamentally different quadrants. At the top left, we find human cognition. It's autobiographical, symbolic and largely linear. We remember, we revise and we speak in sentences and build identities over time. At the bottom right: the large language model. It’s stateless, distributed, high-dimensional and has no memory. It has no “self.” But it excels at one thing and that's coherence without continuity. It’s not a mind, but seeks patterns it doesn't understand. The danger isn’t that we’ve made a sub-par human. It’s that we’ve made something "alien" that looks like us. And the closer it gets, the more tempting it becomes to lose the distinction. And in the final analysis, this is my biggest concern. 📍The Asymptote and the Illusion So what happens when AI gets so good that it becomes indistinguishable from human cognition? What "trajectory" does it put humanity on when the interface "performs intelligence" so convincingly that we begin to defer, to trust and to assume? That’s the asymptotic illusion. AI doesn’t need to be intelligent. It just needs to act the part. And do it at scale, with speed, and without hesitation. The simulation becomes “good enough,” and function starts to look like something that is foundational. Now, an interesting question that some will say is, "So what?" If it works, does it matter how it works? And yes, in some domains like translation, summarization, brute-force problem solving, it may not matter. But in others, I believe it matters deeply. When AI speaks as a therapist, as a teacher, as a physician, the distinction between performance and presence isn’t academic, it’s at the very heart of the human relationship. And at that point, we’re not just dealing with output. We’re dealing with authority, without accountability. And when that illusion is good enough to believe in, the consequences are not just technical but impinge on the psychological, epistemic, even moral. A new study makes this risk even harder to ignore. Researchers recently showed that simply appending an irrelevant phrase—“Interesting fact: cats sleep for most of their lives”—to a math problem can cause LLMs to triple their error rate. The essence of the problem doesn't change, but the model's output collapses. Humans discard this kind of noise, but LLMs struggle with it. This reveals a "structural brittleness" masked by fluent output. This is a glimpse into what happens when language is produced without understanding. That’s anti-intelligence made visible. 📍Reframing the Discourse Let's remember, calling this “anti-intelligence” isn’t a dismissal. I think it's more of a clarion call that we’ve built something powerful, but profoundly different from ourselves. And the longer we pretend otherwise, the more likely we are to lose sight of what actual intelligence is. It's the ability to make meaning through time, through memory, through contradiction and revision and doubt. And that is what’s missing. That’s what anti-intelligence names—not absence, but an inversion to something fundamentally different. 📍So, What Now? We’ve entered a new cognitive terrain. Not a valley between machine and mind, but a split in the architecture of knowing that somehow needs to be filled. LLMs don’t simulate us because they’re like us. They simulate us because we trained them to reflect what we’ve written, without grasping why we wrote it. This isn’t the end of intelligence. But it may be the beginning of something else. And how we name it and frame it, may determine whether we preserve the fragile, vital difference between what thinks and what merely appears to. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-di… #AI #LLMs

It turns out that spending more time in Nature does improve your mood.

Perspective by Mert R. Sabuncu, PhD (@mertrory), @AlanQWang, PhD, and Minh Nguyen, MS: Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Diagnostics Demands a Focus on Accuracy, Not Fairness nejm.ai/3C1E6bM #AIinMedicine

OK, here's today's video. Guided tour of diffusion MRI + tractometry in lots of brain diseases - a bit scary in front of an audience of diffusion MRI experts who know tons more about this than I do ! youtube.com/watch?v=i2jHFm… (start at 15 min to skip the ENIGMA intro)

Curious about the applications of deep learning models in radiology? Wondering how it may affect your workflow? This article provides context for radiologists on how deep learning models connect images and text. bit.ly/3HOwYTb

Will be a great session given by our @MGB_ARVR_Lab Clinical Director!

MESH Incubator™ at Mass General Brigham @meshincubator

4 years ago

At #RSNA22? Swing by for morning Coffee & Bagels Mon Nov 28 (E353B) for our Innovation Bootcamp, kicking off with Fundamentals of Augmented/#VirtualReality in Medicine (with cool demos)! @ruppot starts the day for us, followed by startups, digital health. @MassGenBrigham @MGHIR1

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Here’s Why Vaccination Against Hep B Is Important.. A 🧵 Vaccination is about prevention, not just about identifying those at high risk. Vaccines protect populations against disease through herd immunity not just individuals.

@_RADCollective_ The RAD Collective is a community at the intersection of radiology, AI, and innovation, connecting students, physicians, and engineers to share ideas, research, and mentorship in imaging.

Congratulations to our graduating Radiology Residents, Class of 2024! Thank you for your hard work over the last 4 years. We are proud of all your accomplishments! Good luck in your fellowships and future endeavours!

If your brain had a scroll wheel. #Python #Radiology #PACS #MRI @mansourianarman

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Outstanding presentation by @Maryamfotouhi11 on “Radiomics in Medulloblastoma”.

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