Using AI and old reports to understand new medical images

Scientists employ an underused resource — radiology reports that accompany medical images — to improve the interpretive abilities of machine learning algorithms.

Getting a quick and accurate reading of an X-ray or some other medical images can be vital to a patient’s health and might even save a life. Obtaining such an assessment depends on the availability of a skilled radiologist and, consequently, a rapid response is not always possible. For that reason, says Ruizhi “Ray” Liao, a postdoc and a recent PhD graduate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), “we want to train machines that are capable of reproducing what radiologists do every day.” Liao is first author of a new paper, written with other researchers at MIT and Boston-area hospitals, that is being presented this fall at MICCAI 2021, an international conference on medical image computing.

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