Artificial intelligence in radiology: relevance of collaborative work between radiologists and engineers for building a multidisciplinary team

Expert gaze as a usability indicator of medical AI decision support systems: a preliminary study

Given the current state of medical artificial intelligence (AI) and perceptions towards it, collaborative systems are becoming the preferred choice for clinical workflows. This work aims to address expert interaction with medical AI support systems to gain insight towards how these systems can be better designed with the user in mind. As eye tracking metrics have been shown to be robust indicators of usability, we employ them for evaluating the usability and user interaction with medical AI support systems. We use expert gaze to assess experts' interaction with an AI software for caries detection in bitewing x-ray images. We compared standard viewing of bitewing images without AI support versus viewing where AI support could be freely toggled on and off. We found that experts turned the AI on for roughly 25% of the total inspection task, and generally turned it on halfway through the course of the inspection. Gaze behavior showed that when supported by AI, more attention was dedicated to user interface elements related to the AI support, with more frequent transitions from the image itself to these elements. When considering that expert visual strategy is already optimized for fast and effective image inspection, such interruptions in attention can lead to increased time needed for the overall assessment. Gaze analysis provided valuable insights into an AI's usability for medical image inspection. Further analyses of these tools and how to delineate metrical measures of usability should be developed.

Radiologic Technology Students' Perceptions on Adoption of Artificial Intelligence Technology in Radiology

Study Purpose

This study aims to analyze radiologic technology student's perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications in radiology.

Methods

A quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted. A pre-validated survey questionnaire with 17 items related to students perceptions of AI and its applications was used. The sample included radiologic technology students from three universities in Saudi Arabia. The survey was conducted online for several weeks, resulting in a sample of 280 radiologic technology students.

Results

Of the participants, 63.9% were aware of AI and its applications. T-tests revealed a statistically significant difference (p = 0.0471) between genders with male participants reflecting slightly higher AI awareness than female participants. Regarding the choice of radiology as specialization, 35% of the participants stated that they would not choose radiology, whereas 65% preferred it. Approximately 56% of the participants expressed concerns about the potential replacement of radiology technologists with AI, and 62.1% strongly agreed on the necessity of incorporating known ethical principles into AI.

Conclusion

The findings reflect a positive evaluation of the applications of this technology, which is attributed to its essential support role. However, tailored education and training programs are necessary to prepare future healthcare professionals for the increasing role of AI in medical sciences.

Technological Advances in SPECT and SPECT/CT Imaging

Single photon emission tomography/computed tomography (SPECT/CT) is a mature imaging technology with a dynamic role in the diagnosis and monitoring of a wide array of diseases. This paper reviews the technological advances, clinical impact, and future directions of SPECT and SPECT/CT imaging. The focus of this review is on signal amplifier devices, detector materials, camera head and collimator designs, image reconstruction techniques, and quantitative methods. Bulky photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) are being replaced by position-sensitive PMTs (PSPMTs), avalanche photodiodes (APDs), and silicon PMs to achieve higher detection efficiency and improved energy resolution and spatial resolution. Most recently, new SPECT cameras have been designed for cardiac imaging. The new design involves using specialised collimators in conjunction with conventional sodium iodide detectors (NaI(Tl)) or an L-shaped camera head, which utilises semiconductor detector materials such as CdZnTe (CZT: cadmium-zinc-telluride). The clinical benefits of the new design include shorter scanning times, improved image quality, enhanced patient comfort, reduced claustrophobic effects, and decreased overall size, particularly in specialised clinical centres. These noticeable improvements are also attributed to the implementation of resolution-recovery iterative reconstructions. Immense efforts have been made to establish SPECT and SPECT/CT imaging as quantitative tools by incorporating camera-specific modelling. Moreover, this review includes clinical examples in oncology, neurology, cardiology, musculoskeletal, and infection, demonstrating the impact of these advancements on clinical practice in radiology and molecular imaging departments.

Clinical, Cultural, Computational, and Regulatory Considerations to Deploy AI in Radiology: Perspectives of RSNA and MICCAI Experts

The Radiological Society of North of America (RSNA) and the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Society have led a series of joint panels and seminars focused on the present impact and future directions of artificial intelligence (AI) in radiology. These conversations have collected viewpoints from multidisciplinary experts in radiology, medical imaging, and machine learning on the current clinical penetration of AI technology in radiology and how it is impacted by trust, reproducibility, explainability, and accountability. The collective points-both practical and philosophical-define the cultural changes for radiologists and AI scientists working together and describe the challenges ahead for AI technologies to meet broad approval. This article presents the perspectives of experts from MICCAI and RSNA on the clinical, cultural, computational, and regulatory considerations-coupled with recommended reading materials-essential to adopt AI technology successfully in radiology and, more generally, in clinical practice. The report emphasizes the importance of collaboration to improve clinical deployment, highlights the need to integrate clinical and medical imaging data, and introduces strategies to ensure smooth and incentivized integration. Keywords: Adults and Pediatrics, Computer Applications-General (Informatics), Diagnosis, Prognosis © RSNA, 2024.

The Integration of Deep Learning in Radiotherapy: Exploring Challenges, Opportunities, and Future Directions through an Umbrella Review

This study investigates, through a narrative review, the transformative impact of deep learning (DL) in the field of radiotherapy, particularly in light of the accelerated developments prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed approach was based on an umbrella review following a standard narrative checklist and a qualification process. The selection process identified 19 systematic review studies. Through an analysis of current research, the study highlights the revolutionary potential of DL algorithms in optimizing treatment planning, image analysis, and patient outcome prediction in radiotherapy. It underscores the necessity of further exploration into specific research areas to unlock the full capabilities of DL technology. Moreover, the study emphasizes the intricate interplay between digital radiology and radiotherapy, revealing how advancements in one field can significantly influence the other. This interdependence is crucial for addressing complex challenges and advancing the integration of cutting-edge technologies into clinical practice. Collaborative efforts among researchers, clinicians, and regulatory bodies are deemed essential to effectively navigate the evolving landscape of DL in radiotherapy. By fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and conducting thorough investigations, stakeholders can fully leverage the transformative power of DL to enhance patient care and refine therapeutic strategies. Ultimately, this promises to usher in a new era of personalized and optimized radiotherapy treatment for improved patient outcomes.

A Fully Automated Post-Surgical Brain Tumor Segmentation Model for Radiation Treatment Planning and Longitudinal Tracking

Glioblastoma (GBM) has a poor survival rate even with aggressive surgery, concomitant radiation therapy (RT), and adjuvant chemotherapy. Standard-of-care RT involves irradiating a lower dose to the hyperintense lesion in T2-weighted fluid-attenuated inversion recovery MRI (T2w/FLAIR) and a higher dose to the enhancing tumor on contrast-enhanced, T1-weighted MRI (CE-T1w). While there have been several attempts to segment pre-surgical brain tumors, there have been minimal efforts to segment post-surgical tumors, which are complicated by a resection cavity and postoperative blood products, and tools are needed to assist physicians in generating treatment contours and assessing treated patients on follow up. This report is one of the first to train and test multiple deep learning models for the purpose of post-surgical brain tumor segmentation for RT planning and longitudinal tracking. Post-surgical FLAIR and CE-T1w MRIs, as well as their corresponding RT targets (GTV1 and GTV2, respectively) from 225 GBM patients treated with standard RT were trained on multiple deep learning models including: Unet, ResUnet, Swin-Unet, 3D Unet, and Swin-UNETR. These models were tested on an independent dataset of 30 GBM patients with the Dice metric used to evaluate segmentation accuracy. Finally, the best-performing segmentation model was integrated into our longitudinal tracking web application to assign automated structured reporting scores using change in percent cutoffs of lesion volume. The 3D Unet was our best-performing model with mean Dice scores of 0.72 for GTV1 and 0.73 for GTV2 with a standard deviation of 0.17 for both in the test dataset. We have successfully developed a lightweight post-surgical segmentation model for RT planning and longitudinal tracking.

Explainable AI in radiology: a white paper of the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology

The term Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) groups together the scientific body of knowledge developed while searching for methods to explain the inner logic behind the AI algorithm and the model inference based on knowledge-based interpretability. The xAI is now generally recognized as a core area of AI. A variety of xAI methods currently are available to researchers; nonetheless, the comprehensive classification of the xAI methods is still lacking. In addition, there is no consensus among the researchers with regards to what an explanation exactly is and which are salient properties that must be considered to make it understandable for every end-user. The SIRM introduces an xAI-white paper, which is intended to aid Radiologists, medical practitioners, and scientists in the understanding an emerging field of xAI, the black-box problem behind the success of the AI, the xAI methods to unveil the black-box into a glass-box, the role, and responsibilities of the Radiologists for appropriate use of the AI-technology. Due to the rapidly changing and evolution of AI, a definitive conclusion or solution is far away from being defined. However, one of our greatest responsibilities is to keep up with the change in a critical manner. In fact, ignoring and discrediting the advent of AI a priori will not curb its use but could result in its application without awareness. Therefore, learning and increasing our knowledge about this very important technological change will allow us to put AI at our service and at the service of the patients in a conscious way, pushing this paradigm shift as far as it will benefit us.

The role of Artificial intelligence in the assessment of the spine and spinal cord

Artificial intelligence (AI) application development is underway in all areas of radiology where many promising tools are focused on the spine and spinal cord. In the past decade, multiple spine AI algorithms have been created based on radiographs, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging. These algorithms have wide-ranging purposes including automatic labeling of vertebral levels, automated description of disc degenerative changes, detection and classification of spine trauma, identification of osseous lesions, and the assessment of cord pathology. The overarching goals for these algorithms include improved patient throughput, reducing radiologist workload burden, and improving diagnostic accuracy. There are several pre-requisite tasks required in order to achieve these goals, such as automatic image segmentation, facilitating image acquisition and postprocessing. In this narrative review, we discuss some of the important imaging AI solutions that have been developed for the assessment of the spine and spinal cord. We focus on their practical applications and briefly discuss some key requirements for the successful integration of these tools into practice. The potential impact of AI in the imaging assessment of the spine and cord is vast and promises to provide broad reaching improvements for clinicians, radiologists, and patients alike.

Survey of explainable artificial intelligence techniques for biomedical imaging with deep neural networks

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques of deep learning have revolutionized the disease diagnosis with their outstanding image classification performance. In spite of the outstanding results, the widespread adoption of these techniques in clinical practice is still taking place at a moderate pace. One of the major hindrance is that a trained Deep Neural Networks (DNN) model provides a prediction, but questions about why and how that prediction was made remain unanswered. This linkage is of utmost importance for the regulated healthcare domain to increase the trust in the automated diagnosis system by the practitioners, patients and other stakeholders. The application of deep learning for medical imaging has to be interpreted with caution due to the health and safety concerns similar to blame attribution in the case of an accident involving autonomous cars. The consequences of both a false positive and false negative cases are far reaching for patients' welfare and cannot be ignored. This is exacerbated by the fact that the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms comprise of complex interconnected structures, millions of parameters, and a 'black box' nature, offering little understanding of their inner working unlike the traditional machine learning algorithms. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques help to understand model predictions which help develop trust in the system, accelerate the disease diagnosis, and meet adherence to regulatory requirements. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the promising field of XAI for biomedical imaging diagnostics. We also provide a categorization of the XAI techniques, discuss the open challenges, and provide future directions for XAI which would be of interest to clinicians, regulators and model developers.

Past, present, and future in sports imaging: how to drive in a three-lane freeway

KEY POINTS

• Morphological evaluation of SRIs is still nowadays the clinical standard in daily practice.• New functional imaging modalities show potential to add valuable physiopathological information about the insights of SRIs in specific clinical scenarios.• In the era of personalized medicine, AI algorithms may help athletes and all professionals involved in their care to improve the evaluation of SRIs through a definitive quantitative metric approach.

Impact of the Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Radiology: What Do Students Think?

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, and particularly in radiology, is becoming increasingly prominent. Its impact will transform the way the specialty is practiced and the current and future education model. The aim of this study is to analyze the perception that undergraduate medical students have about the current situation of AI in medicine, especially in radiology. A survey with 17 items was distributed to medical students between 3 January to 31 March 2022. Two hundred and eighty-one students correctly responded the questionnaire; 79.3% of them claimed that they knew what AI is. However, their objective knowledge about AI was low but acceptable. Only 24.9% would choose radiology as a specialty, and only 40% of them as one of their first three options. The applications of this technology were valued positively by most students, who give it an important Support Role, without fear that the radiologist will be replaced by AI (79.7%). The majority (95.7%) agreed with the need to implement well-established ethical principles in AI, and 80% valued academic training in AI positively. Surveyed medical students have a basic understanding of AI and perceive it as a useful tool that will transform radiology.

Machine learning applications in upper gastrointestinal cancer surgery: a systematic review

BACKGROUND

Machine learning (ML) has seen an increase in application, and is an important element of a digital evolution. The role of ML within upper gastrointestinal surgery for malignancies has not been evaluated properly in the literature. Therefore, this systematic review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of ML applications within upper gastrointestinal surgery for malignancies.

METHODS

A systematic search was performed in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane, and Web of Science. Studies were only included when they described machine learning in upper gastrointestinal surgery for malignancies. The Cochrane risk-of-bias tool was used to determine the methodological quality of studies. The accuracy and area under the curve were evaluated, representing the predictive performances of ML models.

RESULTS

From a total of 1821 articles, 27 studies met the inclusion criteria. Most studies received a moderate risk-of-bias score. The majority of these studies focused on neural networks (n = 9), multiple machine learning (n = 8), and random forests (n = 3). Remaining studies involved radiomics (n = 3), support vector machines (n = 3), and decision trees (n = 1). Purposes of ML included predominantly prediction of metastasis, detection of risk factors, prediction of survival, and prediction of postoperative complications. Other purposes were predictions of TNM staging, chemotherapy response, tumor resectability, and optimal therapy.

CONCLUSIONS

Machine Learning algorithms seem to contribute to the prediction of postoperative complications and the course of disease after upper gastrointestinal surgery for malignancies. However, due to the retrospective character of ML studies, these results require trials or prospective studies to validate this application of ML.

Interdisciplinary collaboration: Data scientists and radiologists

Interdisciplinary collaboration has become sought after by most institutions and corporations over the past few decades. This type of collaboration has grown exponentially since the advent of the internet and the information age. With the wave of interest to develop machine learning for the interpretation of diagnostic images it has become necessary for data scientists and radiologists to communicate through interdisciplinary research and collaboration. Such communication requires careful navigation for productive and meaningful outcomes. This article seeks to offer an overview of some previous literature discussing the best practices when forming interdisciplinary collaborative teams, explore some of the communication similarities and differences between the radiologist and data scientist disciplines, share some examples where pitfalls have caused confusion or frustration and re-work, and also to convey that, through trust, listening skills and knowing one's limitations, much can be learned and accomplished when working together.

Natural Language Processing in Radiology: Update on Clinical Applications

Radiological reports are a valuable source of information used to guide clinical care and support research. Organizing and managing this content, however, frequently requires several manual curations due to the more common unstructured nature of the reports. However, manual review of these reports for clinical knowledge extraction is costly and time-consuming. Natural language processing (NLP) is a set of methods developed to extract structured meaning from a body of text and can be used to optimize the workflow of health care professionals. Specifically, NLP methods can help radiologists as decision support systems and improve the management of patients' medical data. In this study, we highlight the opportunities offered by NLP in the field of radiology. A comprehensive review of the most commonly used NLP methods to extract information from radiological reports and the development of tools to improve radiological workflow using this information is presented. Finally, we review the important limitations of these tools and discuss the relevant observations and trends in the application of NLP to radiology that could benefit the field in the future.

Medical image augmentation for lesion detection using a texture-constrained multichannel progressive GAN

Lesion detectors based on deep learning can assist doctors in diagnosing diseases. However, the performance of current detectors is likely to be unsatisfactory due to the scarcity of training samples. Therefore, it is beneficial to use image generation to augment the training set of a detector. However, when the imaging texture of the medical image is relatively delicate, the synthesized image generated by an existing method may be too poor in quality to meet the training requirements of the detectors. In this regard, a medical image augmentation method, namely, a texture-constrained multichannel progressive generative adversarial network (TMP-GAN), is proposed in this work. TMP-GAN uses joint training of multiple channels to effectively avoid the typical shortcomings of the current generation methods. It also uses an adversarial learning-based texture discrimination loss to further improve the fidelity of the synthesized images. In addition, TMP-GAN employs a progressive generation mechanism to steadily improve the accuracy of the medical image synthesizer. Experiments on the publicly available dataset CBIS-DDMS and our pancreatic tumor dataset show that the precision/recall/F1-score of the detector trained on the TMP-GAN augmented dataset improves by 2.59%/2.70%/2.77% and 2.44%/2.06%/2.36%, respectively, compared to the optimal results of other data augmentation methods. The FROC curve of the detector is also better than the curve from the contrast-augmented trained dataset. Therefore, we believe the proposed TMP-GAN is a practical technique to efficiently implement lesion detection case studies.

The Artificial Intelligence in Digital Radiology: Part 1: The Challenges, Acceptance and Consensus

Artificial intelligence is having important developments in the world of digital radiology also thanks to the boost given to the research sector by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the last two years, there was an important development of studies focused on both challenges and acceptance and consensus in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The challenges and acceptance and consensus are two strategic aspects in the development and integration of technologies in the health domain. The study conducted two narrative reviews by means of two parallel points of view to take stock both on the ongoing challenges and on initiatives conducted to face the acceptance and consensus in this area. The methodology of the review was based on: (I) search of PubMed and Scopus and (II) an eligibility assessment, using parameters with 5 levels of score. The results have: (a) highlighted and categorized the important challenges in place. (b) Illustrated the different types of studies conducted through original questionnaires. The study suggests for future research based on questionnaires a better calibration and inclusion of the challenges in place together with validation and administration paths at an international level.

Human, All Too Human? An All-Around Appraisal of the "Artificial Intelligence Revolution" in Medical Imaging

Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen dramatic growth over the past decade, evolving from a niche super specialty computer application into a powerful tool which has revolutionized many areas of our professional and daily lives, and the potential of which seems to be still largely untapped. The field of medicine and medical imaging, as one of its various specialties, has gained considerable benefit from AI, including improved diagnostic accuracy and the possibility of predicting individual patient outcomes and options of more personalized treatment. It should be noted that this process can actively support the ongoing development of advanced, highly specific treatment strategies (e.g., target therapies for cancer patients) while enabling faster workflow and more efficient use of healthcare resources. The potential advantages of AI over conventional methods have made it attractive for physicians and other healthcare stakeholders, raising much interest in both the research and the industry communities. However, the fast development of AI has unveiled its potential for disrupting the work of healthcare professionals, spawning concerns among radiologists that, in the future, AI may outperform them, thus damaging their reputations or putting their jobs at risk. Furthermore, this development has raised relevant psychological, ethical, and medico-legal issues which need to be addressed for AI to be considered fully capable of patient management. The aim of this review is to provide a brief, hopefully exhaustive, overview of the state of the art of AI systems regarding medical imaging, with a special focus on how AI and the entire healthcare environment should be prepared to accomplish the goal of a more advanced human-centered world.

Applications of deep learning techniques for automated multiple sclerosis detection using magnetic resonance imaging: A review

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a type of brain disease which causes visual, sensory, and motor problems for people with a detrimental effect on the functioning of the nervous system. In order to diagnose MS, multiple screening methods have been proposed so far; among them, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has received considerable attention among physicians. MRI modalities provide physicians with fundamental information about the structure and function of the brain, which is crucial for the rapid diagnosis of MS lesions. Diagnosing MS using MRI is time-consuming, tedious, and prone to manual errors. Research on the implementation of computer aided diagnosis system (CADS) based on artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose MS involves conventional machine learning and deep learning (DL) methods. In conventional machine learning, feature extraction, feature selection, and classification steps are carried out by using trial and error; on the contrary, these steps in DL are based on deep layers whose values are automatically learn. In this paper, a complete review of automated MS diagnosis methods performed using DL techniques with MRI neuroimaging modalities is provided. Initially, the steps involved in various CADS proposed using MRI modalities and DL techniques for MS diagnosis are investigated. The important preprocessing techniques employed in various works are analyzed. Most of the published papers on MS diagnosis using MRI modalities and DL are presented. The most significant challenges facing and future direction of automated diagnosis of MS using MRI modalities and DL techniques are also provided.