1 research outputs found
Deep Learning for Distinguishing Normal versus Abnormal Chest Radiographs and Generalization to Unseen Diseases
Chest radiography (CXR) is the most widely-used thoracic clinical imaging
modality and is crucial for guiding the management of cardiothoracic
conditions. The detection of specific CXR findings has been the main focus of
several artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, the wide range of
possible CXR abnormalities makes it impractical to build specific systems to
detect every possible condition. In this work, we developed and evaluated an AI
system to classify CXRs as normal or abnormal. For development, we used a
de-identified dataset of 248,445 patients from a multi-city hospital network in
India. To assess generalizability, we evaluated our system using 6
international datasets from India, China, and the United States. Of these
datasets, 4 focused on diseases that the AI was not trained to detect: 2
datasets with tuberculosis and 2 datasets with coronavirus disease 2019. Our
results suggest that the AI system generalizes to new patient populations and
abnormalities. In a simulated workflow where the AI system prioritized abnormal
cases, the turnaround time for abnormal cases reduced by 7-28%. These results
represent an important step towards evaluating whether AI can be safely used to
flag cases in a general setting where previously unseen abnormalities exist