Again, focusing on Radiology, where I see AI making its greatest impact is a) in the emergency scenario, think stroke and trauma, where time is of the essence and b) in large public health projects where vast amounts of screening data is collected that needs considerable radiologist time to analyse, as with breast cancer or TB detection.
In stroke in particular, our work in teleradiology has shown that AI has been transformative in improving patient outcomes. Hospitals across the world have adopted AI technologies that analyse CT scans to detect and quantify stroke, differentiate hemorrhagic from ischemic stroke and identify vessel blockages. Our own group has developed an Algorithm NeuralAssist which can detect, quantify and localise hemorrhage in the setting of stroke and trauma, identify the thrombosed middle cerebral artery which forms the nidus of the stroke, detect brain swelling and skull fracture in a trauma patient. This algorithm is currently being deployed at NIMHANS and within our own Emergency Teleradiology practice.
At the other end of the spectrum, our MammoAssist Algorithm helps detect early breast cancer on Mammography, an imaging modality which is time consuming to interpret and where the risk of error can significantly impact on patient life expectancy. In large national screening programs for breast cancer where the number of studies is enormous, AI such as this can be transformative.
AI currently adds great value in the setting of triage. By identifying the positive study for example in stroke, an alert system can be activated by the AI algorithm that can ensure immediate physician response that can greatly benefit outcomes. And in the TB screening environment, the AI algorithm can immediately filter out normal studies allowing the radiologist to conserve time and energy for the analysis of the positive cases.
As we know, the larger the dataset the AI is trained on, the better its performance tends to be. As a result, in relatively rarer conditions, the output of AI may not meet the expectations.
