Emergency department triage: Artificial Intelligence’s gateway to radiology

The earliest adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within clinical workflows has emerged within the emergency setting where it can manage priority for interpretation of imaging studies. In this triage role, AI does not commit to a diagnosis; rather it offers a binary decision as to whether the image contains a specific finding. The goal is to expedite the interpretation of the most critical cases, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes.

Stroke workflow, primed for optimization
One clinical domain particularly suited to workflow optimization, due to its time critical nature, is acute stroke. Advances in treatment have resulted in continually shifting guidelines, adding complexity to the time pressured decisions. With several key imaging features involved in stroke triage, it lends itself to the current focus on narrow AI solutions.

Intracranial Hemorrhage (ICH) detection
ICH is a medical emergency and timely diagnosis is critical as nearly half of resulting mortalities occur within the first 24 hours. The speed of interpretation is dependent on the priority assigned to the scan request, which is a particular risk when symptoms can be vague. Automated ICH detection, as implemented by Canon Medical Systems’ Stroke CT Package, can address this problem by automatically detecting ICH and pushing the results to the neurointerventionalist. A case example is shown in Figure 1.

Performance of this algorithm, assessed in a validation cohort of 200 ICH positive and 102 non-ICH patients, yielded the following results (Table 1): a sensitivity of 0.93, specificity of 0.93, Positive Predictive Value (PPV) of 0.85 and Negative Predictive Value (NPV) of 0.98. Of note, where the algorithm performance is challenged is in cases of small volume hemorrhages. The author notes that ensemble methods using multimodal data may be used to address this limitation in the future.

Reference
Rava et al. | Assessment of an Artificial Intelligence Algorithm for Detection of Intracranial Hemorrhage | World Neurosurgery (2021)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33684578/

Large Vessel Occlusion (LVO) detection
With the introduction of endovascular clot retrieval to routine clinical workflows, the identification of those patients who would benefit from the treatment quickly became top priority in stroke workflows. Implementing the automated detection of large vessel occlusions (LVO) in CTA, as provided by Canon Medical Systems’ Stroke CT Package, addresses this triage need.

The performance of this LVO detection solution was assessed in a cohort of 202 acute ischemic patients, 100 of whom had an occlusion within the Internal Carotid Artery (ICA), M1 or M2 regions of the Middle Cerebral Artery (MCA) and 102 patients with no occlusion. Analysis including all patients produced the following metrics (Table 1): a sensitivity of 0.73, specificity of 0.98, PPV of 0.99 and NPV of 0.64. As with ICH detection, it seems size matters. As the occlusions become more distal, within the MCA M2 region, they decrease in size and a drop off in performance is seen, with sensitivity falling to 0.5. With any such automated detection task there is a trade off in sensitivity versus specificity, however in this clinical scenario this algorithm, for all vessel locations, may benefit from further weighting to improve sensitivity. Figure 1 shows a clinical case example with detected LVO.

These triage applications of narrow AI have become a reality within acute stroke workflows and now the discussion of the effectiveness of these solutions is coming to the fore. It’s clear that further improvement is needed to address the challenges around the smaller, more subtle examples of pathologies, which will be tackled by additional training examples and techniques such as ensemble learning.

Reference
Rava et al. | Validation of an Artificial Intelligence Driven Large Vessel Occlusion Detection Algorithm for Acute Ischemic Stroke Patients | The Neuroradiology Journal (2021)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33657922/

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