My dad has spent over three decades in nuclear medicine, and even he is surprised by how much AI has changed the way he works. It has made him more efficient and more accurate, but it’s also given him something he values even more: the freedom to be fully present with his patients, something no algorithm could ever imitate.  

I grew up hearing about nuclear medicine the way other kids heard about construction sites or classrooms. My dad, David Smith, has been doing this since the mid-90s, back when computers took up entire rooms and film development meant disappearing into a dark room. 

“When I first entered nuclear medicine,” he said. “There weren’t many technologists at all. They only took a few students a year.” He was one of seven accepted statewide. Now schools take twenty at a time, and the job market is competitive, faster and way more digital.  

He laughed when I asked what the biggest technological shift was. “Computers,” he said immediately. “We used to have films. Actual film. Now everything is computer-generated images.” He discussed how the medications and radiopharmaceuticals they use have advanced too but claimed that the real gamechanger was the computer creating a path between the technologist and the image. “You don’t have to know the anatomy and physiology nearly as much,” he said. “The computers do a lot of the work for you.”  

My generation is entering a time where the computer is already in the room, already in the room interpreting and suggesting probabilities. His generation had to learn about the body first, then the machine. Mine is learning both at the same time, and sometimes the machine is louder.  

When I asked him when he first heard about AI in imaging, he said about ten years ago, but that it only exploded in the last five or six. “Doctors used to just look at the images,” he said. “Now we get statistical analysis. Probabilities. The computer picks up things the human eye can’t.” This poses a question: have the machines stopped being a tool and started becoming a second opinion?  

My sister Rachel, who works as an ICU nurse in Christus St. Frances Cabrini Hospital in Alexandria, La., sees that shift too. “Our charting system has an AI thing,” she said. “Where it condenses a patient’s whole chart, so you don’t have to read every single note.” She uses Dragon for dictation, and she’s seen nurses take pictures of CT scans and run them through ChatGPT to check for strokes, which is just wild.  

The part that surprised me the most was Pacemaker ID, an app that employs AI to identify the manufacturer of a device just from a single chest x-ray. When I asked why the brand mattered, she claimed that if a pacemaker malfunctions or a defibrillator fire when it shouldn’t, the team must call the specific company that made it. Only that company can read the device and send rhythm reports.   

She isn’t scared that AI will take her job. “Nope. Not at all. AI just makes things easier,” she said. That confidence is something my dad shares, even if he expresses it differently.  

People in his generation were skeptical at first. “They didn’t trust it,” he said. “They thought it might replace them. But once they learned how to use it properly, they wanted more of it.” He’s not afraid of being replaced, but he is afraid of people misusing the technology or relying on it without understanding the patient in front of them. “You still need someone with judgment,” he shared. “Somebody who can look at a patient and know when something’s wrong before the computer ever does.”  

He said that’s the part AI will never touch, the instinct you build after years of watching real people, not just images on a screen. Machines can calculate probabilities, but they can’t feel the shift in a patient’s breathing, or notice the panic in someone’s eyes, or decide to stop a scan because something just doesn’t look right. “A computer can’t comfort anybody,” he added. “It can’t explain what’s happening in a way that makes someone less scared.”  

He’s right.   

Half of patient care is emotional. It is compassion. It is making someone believe they’re going to be okay. AI can tell you the probability of survival, but it can’t sit beside you and convince you to fight anyway.  

When I asked him what worries him most about the next generation, he didn’t talk about technology at all. He talked about teamwork. “Younger people don’t always see the whole picture,” he said. “Healthcare is a team environment. If you’re only focused on yourself, you’re not helping anybody.”  

And maybe that’s the real difference between his generation and mine. He entered a field that demanded human connection first and technical skill second. We’re entering a time where technology is so advanced that it will overshadow human involvement if we let it.  

But at the end of our conversation, he said something that surprised me. “The new technology keeps me passionate,” he told me. “Learning something new keeps the job from getting old.”  

Maybe that’s the point. AI isn’t replacing the people who care. It’s just changing the tools we use to do the caring.