A 178-clinical-center experiment of integrating AI solutions for lung pathology diagnosis.

In 2020, an experiment testing AI solutions for lung X-ray analysis on a multi-hospital network was conducted. The multi-hospital network linked 178 Moscow state healthcare centers, where all chest X-rays from the network were redirected to a research facility, analyzed with AI, and returned to the centers. The experiment was formulated as a public competition with monetary awards for participating industrial and research teams. The task was to perform the binary detection of abnormalities from chest X-rays. For the objective real-life evaluation, no training X-rays were provided to the participants. This paper presents one of the top-performing AI frameworks from this experiment. First, the framework used two EfficientNets, histograms of gradients, Haar feature ensembles, and local binary patterns to recognize whether an input image represents an acceptable lung X-ray sample, meaning the X-ray is not grayscale inverted, is a frontal chest X-ray, and completely captures both lung fields. Second, the framework extracted the region with lung fields and then passed them to a multi-head DenseNet, where the heads recognized the patient's gender, age and the potential presence of abnormalities, and generated the heatmap with the abnormality regions highlighted. During one month of the experiment from 11.23.2020 to 12.25.2020, 17,888 cases have been analyzed by the framework with 11,902 cases having radiological reports with the reference diagnoses that were unequivocally parsed by the experiment organizers. The performance measured in terms of the area under receiving operator curve (AUC) was 0.77. The AUC for individual diseases ranged from 0.55 for herniation to 0.90 for pneumothorax.

Artificial Intelligence for the Analysis of Workload-Related Changes in Radiologists' Gaze Patterns.

Around 60-80% of radiological errors are attributed to overlooked abnormalities, the rate of which increases at the end of work shifts. In this study, we run an experiment to investigate if artificial intelligence (AI) can assist in detecting radiologists' gaze patterns that correlate with fatigue. A retrospective database of lung X-ray images with the reference diagnoses was used. The X-ray images were acquired from 400 subjects with a mean age of 49 ± 17, and 61% men. Four practicing radiologists read these images while their eye movements were recorded. The radiologists passed a series of concentration tests at prearranged breaks of the experiment. A U-Net neural network was adapted to annotate lung anatomy on X-rays and calculate coverage and information gain features from the radiologists' eye movements over lung fields. The lung coverage, information gain, and eye tracker-based features were compared with the cumulative work done (CDW) label for each radiologist. The gaze-traveled distance, X-ray coverage, and lung coverage statistically significantly (p < 0.01) deteriorated with cumulative work done (CWD) for three out of four radiologists. The reading time and information gain over lungs statistically significantly deteriorated for all four radiologists. We discovered a novel AI-based metric blending reading time, speed, and organ coverage, which can be used to predict changes in the fatigue-related image reading patterns.

Multi-landmark environment analysis with reinforcement learning for pelvic abnormality detection and quantification.

Morphological abnormalities of the femoroacetabular (hip) joint are among the most common human musculoskeletal disorders and often develop asymptomatically at early easily treatable stages. In this paper, we propose an automated framework for landmark-based detection and quantification of hip abnormalities from magnetic resonance (MR) images. The framework relies on a novel idea of multi-landmark environment analysis with reinforcement learning. In particular, we merge the concepts of the graphical lasso and Morris sensitivity analysis with deep neural networks to quantitatively estimate the contribution of individual landmark and landmark subgroup locations to the other landmark locations. Convolutional neural networks for image segmentation are utilized to propose the initial landmark locations, and landmark detection is then formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, where each landmark-agent can adjust its position by observing the local MR image neighborhood and the locations of the most-contributive landmarks. The framework was validated on T1-, T2- and proton density-weighted MR images of 260 patients with the aim to measure the lateral center-edge angle (LCEA), femoral neck-shaft angle (NSA), and the anterior and posterior acetabular sector angles (AASA and PASA) of the hip, and derive the quantitative abnormality metrics from these angles. The framework was successfully tested using the UNet and feature pyramid network (FPN) segmentation architectures for landmark proposal generation, and the deep Q-network (DeepQN), deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3), and actor-critic policy gradient (A2C) RL networks for landmark position optimization. The resulting overall landmark detection error of 1.5 mm and angle measurement error of 1.4° indicates a superior performance in comparison to existing methods. Moreover, the automatically estimated abnormality labels were in 95% agreement with those generated by an expert radiologist.