How AI helps in Triaging Imagery

Radiologists gain knowledge to interpret medical images after a long training process and in spite of the same training there is still a lack of consensus among radiologists most of the time when an image is interpreted. Also there are false positives and false negatives seen in diagnosis which affects the standard of treatment planning.

Fulfilling all these shortcomings of human eye artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have demonstrated a remarkable progress in image-recognition.

The need for greater efficacy and efficiency are the reasons behind the emergence of AI in medical imaging. There has been a tremendous increase in workload for radiologists due to imbalance between increasing imaging data and the number of available trained readers. 

In such situations AI can make life much easier by providing trained radiologists with pre-screened images with identified features, so within the same time frame more imaging workflow can be addressed with much more efficiency and reduced errors. Al works on automatic report-generation tools which gives a more standardized report with better terminologies making it easier for physicians to understand.

Though it has significantly changed the face of radiology yet there are some challenges faced by AI one of which is ethical issues which may arise from the use of patient data to train the AI systems which lacks the secure connections between place of generation of these data and the one where the AI systems are trained. Another major problem arises when understanding of deep learning AI is not achieved since it is a strong theoretical subject which requires proper training. In some instances AI can give no answer when a rare disease is encountered because the technology is not aware of such a rare entity in such cases the human knowledge is the only task dealer.

AI is still expected to see more improvements in future. It is slowly getting acceptance among physicians and it will take a couple of more years for AI to be used with full confidence by physicians across the globe.