We propose a fully automated algorithm based on a deep learning framework enabling screening of a coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) examination for confident detection of the presence or absence of coronary artery atherosclerosis. The system starts with extracting the coronary arteries and their branches from CCTA datasets and representing them with multi-planar reformatted volumes; pre-processing and augmentation techniques are then applied to increase the robustness and generalization ability of the system. A 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) is utilized to model pathological changes (e.g., atherosclerotic plaques) in coronary vessels. The system learns the discriminatory features between vessels with and without atherosclerosis. The discriminative features at the final convolutional layer are visualized with a saliency map approach to provide visual clues related to atherosclerosis likelihood and location. We have evaluated the system on a reference dataset representing 247 patients with atherosclerosis and 246 patients free of atherosclerosis. With five fold cross-validation, an Accuracy = 90.9%, Positive Predictive Value = 58.8%, Sensitivity = 68.9%, Specificity of 93.6%, and Negative Predictive Value (NPV) = 96.1% are achieved at the artery/branch level with threshold 0.5. The average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve is 0.91. The system indicates a high NPV, which may be potentially useful for assisting interpreting physicians in excluding coronary atherosclerosis in patients with acute chest pain.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become commonplace in solving routine everyday tasks. Because of the exponential growth in medical imaging data volume and complexity, the workload on radiologists is steadily increasing. AI has been shown to improve efficiency in medical image generation, processing, and interpretation, and various such AI models have been developed across research laboratories worldwide. However, very few of these, if any, find their way into routine clinical use, a discrepancy that reflects the divide between AI research and successful AI translation. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of the intersection of AI and medical imaging landscapes. We also want to inform the readers about the importance of using standards in their radiology workflow and the challenges associated with deploying AI models in the clinical workflow. The main focus of this paper is to examine the existing condition of radiology workflow and identify the challenges hindering the implementation of AI in hospital settings. This report reflects extensive weekly discussions and practical problem-solving expertise accumulated over multiple years by industry experts, imaging informatics professionals, research scientists, and clinicians. To gain a deeper understanding of the requirements for deploying AI models, we introduce a taxonomy of AI use cases, supplemented by real-world instances of AI model integration within hospitals. We will also explain how the need for AI integration in radiology can be addressed using the Medical Open Network for AI (MONAI). MONAI is an open-source consortium for providing reproducible deep learning solutions and integration tools for radiology practice in hospitals.

A graphical user interface promoted involvement of local-expert subspecialty radiologists in ongoing image data curation, including case-by-case annotation, potentially concurrent with artificial i... Purpose To delineate image data curation needs and describe a locally designed graphical user interface (GUI) to aid radiologists in image annotation for artificial intelligence (AI) applications i...