radiology and imaging
Artificial intelligence
and radiology
Artificial intelligence enables content aggregation that extracts information from
diverse healthcare data silos to help radiologists create actionable imaging reports
Neelam Dugar MD
Consultant Radiologist
& Clinical PACS Lead
Doncaster & Bassetlaw
Hospitals NHS Foundation
Trust, UK
In 2016 Geoff Hinton, the British cognitive
psychologist and father of artificial intelligence
(AI) and machine learning, caught the attention of
politicians by declaring that artificial intelligence,
and machine learning, would replace radiologists.
He could not have been further from the truth. It
is clear from the recent presentations at ECR and
RSNA that radiologists will become smarter and
more efficient with the help of AI, but will not be
replaced by it. Radiologists have been using AI for
a long time now. Most radiology departments in
the National Health Service (NHS) use voice
recognition technology – which uses computer
audition AI. The success of voice recognition
technology is down to the integration with
radiologists’ image reading workflow.
These are many types of computer vision AI
that are being assessed for use in radiology
including:
• Computer-aided anomaly detection – AI
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would be used for detection of abnormalities
such as breast lesions, lung nodules on CT, lung
shadows on chest X-ray, stroke on CT,
haemorrhage on CT, fracture on plain X-ray,
colonic polyp, pulmonary embolism detection
on CT, etc
• Computer-aided simple triage – when an
anomaly is detected, AI could be used to raise the
priority of reporting in the worklist. This is being
used for CT detection of haemorrhage in the head
and prioritises reporting
• Computer-aided change detection – this
form of AI would allow detection of change on
serial studies, for example, multiple sclerosis,
tumour progression, etc
• Image fusion or co-registration – these
machine learning algorithms allow fusion of
images between different modalities, for example,
CT and MRI, etc
• Computer-aided classification (also called