By Chu Canh Chieu Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making waves, particularly in the realm of image diagnostics. This transformative technology is empowering medical professionals with faster and more precise diagnostic capabilities, ultimately improving patient outcomes. From streamlining clinical processes to identifying subtle abnormalities invisible to the human eye, AI’s impact on image diagnostics is nothing short of revolutionary.
Reimagine healthcare: The surge of AI technology
The adoption of AI in healthcare has been growing rapidly in recent years, with a staggering 79% of healthcare organisations already using AI in some form. This integration is only expected to increase as the global AI healthcare market is projected to reach $208.2 billion by 2030.
Diagnostic imaging is one of the key areas where AI is making a huge difference. AI’s ability to quickly analyse complex medical images—such as MRIs, CT scans, and X-rays—enables efficient and accurate diagnosis of a wide range of conditions on large datasets. This powerful capability is driving healthcare providers around the world to pursue the integration of AI into their system to enhance the clinical process.
Elevating the care journey with AI-powered imaging
Faster Diagnosis and Intervention: AI-powered tools can analyse medical images within minutes, or even seconds, drastically reducing the time it takes to diagnose life-threatening conditions. In stroke care, AI has been reported to cut the time between CT angiography and intervention by 38 minutes, significantly boosting life-saving potential.
Patient Progress Tracking: For traditional methods, it is challenging to detect minute real-time changes in a patient’s condition. Through constant data monitoring and analysis, AI can track disease progression over time, making it particularly beneficial for diseases like cancer, where tracking changes in tumour size or structure can directly impact treatment decisions.
Reducing Physician Workload: Medical professionals often face an overwhelming amount of imaging data to analyse. AI helps ease this burden by automating many aspects of the image analysis process, reducing human error and preventing burnout among healthcare providers.
Improving Patient Outcomes: The ultimate goal of any healthcare advancement is to improve patient outcomes. By enabling faster diagnosis, enhanced personalised treatments tracking, and more accurate analysis, AI helps doctors deliver better care to patients.
For instance, Google Health has developed an AI model for breast cancer detection, which outperforms human radiologists in identifying cancer in mammograms. This system not only reduces false positives but also minimises missed diagnoses, setting a new standard for accuracy and reliability in cancer screening.
Catching this wave, FPT also delivers solutions designed to improve diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. These include AI-powered systems for early lung cancer detection, cephalometric analysis, and acne diagnosis. Using deep learning, these tools process complex medical images, such as CT scans and X-rays, to identify conditions like tumours and skin diseases with exceptional precision. Further enhancing its impact, FPT’s cloud-based diagnostic system facilitates real-time analysis and reporting, optimising workflows and making advanced diagnostics more accessible to healthcare providers worldwide.
AI diagnostics: Transforming patient care in real-time
Cardiovascular Conditions: AI technology is currently being used to detect cardiovascular problems, such as heart enlargement (cardiomegaly) or valve abnormalities. AI-powered tools can analyse chest X-rays with far greater detail than traditional ones, catching conditions that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Brain Disorders and Tumours: AI has proven incredibly valuable in diagnosing brain-related conditions. It’s being used to detect neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) with much higher accuracy by analysing brain images. Moreover, AI can classify brain tumours in just a few minutes with a 98% accuracy rate.
Cancer Screening: AI technology has made significant strides in the field of cancer screening, particularly in detecting calcifications with remarkable accuracy. This advancement has contributed to decreasing the chances of false positives and overlooked diagnosis. Recently, researchers have developed an interpretable AI model capable of predicting the 5-year risk of breast cancer from mammogram images.
Fractures and Musculoskeletal Injuries: AI’s ability to detect subtle fractures and musculoskeletal injuries that may not be visible to the human eye is proving to be a game-changer, particularly for elderly patients.
A noteworthy example is FPT’s proton dose calculation system developed for a medical device company specialising in proton beam therapy.
This system uses deep learning to calculate precise doses and energy levels in seconds by rendering DICOM CT series with GPU support and incorporating gaze and head tracking. It improves the accuracy of proton beam therapy while significantly reducing the time needed for dose calculations, enhancing both patient care and operational efficiency.
Envisioning the next frontier
As the technology of AI continues to evolve, its transformative impact in healthcare and medical image diagnostics is no longer a vision of the future—it’s a game-changer of today, delivering unparalleled accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility.
Looking ahead, AI is set to revolutionise the clinical process even further, unlocking new possibilities in patient care. For healthcare providers, embracing and maximising the potential of AI solutions isn’t just an option but now a pathway to redefining how care is delivered.
Matthew Brady