Kevin Seals, M.D., University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Health, interventional radiology fellow, is working on a research project using smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home to create a new method for accessing information on device technologies in real time in the interventional radiology (IR) lab. Operators can use the conversational voice interface to retrieve information without breaking sterile scrub. The technology uses using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to rapidly provide information about device sizing and compatibility in IR.

Seals spoke at the 2019 Radiology AIMed conference in Chicago in June.

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Lawrence Tanenbaum, M.D., Radnet vice president and chief technology officer, discusses some of the artificial intelligence (AI) products in radiology that are now commercially available and how AI developments will impact PET, MRI and CT imaging. He spoke at the 2019 Radiology AI-Med conference.

He said AI is helping medical imaging in the following areas:
   • Identify urgent findings and flagging these on the top of worklists.
   • Computer aided detection capabilities that go beyond the traditional to improve efficiency, boost diagnosis and highlight unexpected findings. 
   • Improving diagnostic image reconstruction
   • Tools to enhance the speed, resolution, radiation dose and overall quality of advanced imaging.

Learn more about what AI tools vendors are developing to help medical imaging in the following links:

Technology Report: Artificial Intelligence at RSNA 2018

VIDEO: Editor’s Choice of the Most Innovative New Artificial Intelligence Technologies at RSNA 2018

VIDEO: Artificial Intelligence May Assist in Pediatric Imaging — Interview with Sudhen Desai, M.D.

VIDEO: Editor's Choice of the Most Innovative New Technology at RSNA 2018

VIDEO: AI That Second Reads Radiology Reports and Deals With Incidental Findings — Interview with Nina Kottler, M.D.

VIDEO: RSNA Post-game Report on Artificial Intelligence

VIDEO: AI, Analytics and Informatics: The Future is Here — Interview with Michael Recht, M.D.

This is a quick look inside the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) neuro-interventional suite at Henry Ford Hospital in Detriot, Mich. This neuro-procedure room connects through a door to a traditional operating room and the patient can be transferred using a trolley cot system to move between the two rooms. The MRI is a Philips 1.5T Achieva and the MRI suite includes MRI-safe surgical instruments, furniture and anesthesia system.

Find more Henry Ford Hospital related content.

This is an example of how virtual reality is being used in neuro-radiology to better evaluate patients using advanced imaging. This dataset shows a patient's brain MRI with fused tractography imaging for pre-operative planning. This was part of a 2018 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) hands-on session by Vinodh Kumar, M.D., and Komal Shah, M.D., associate professors of radiology at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Watch the VIDEO: Using Virtual and Augmented Reality to Examine Brain Anatomy and Pathology — an interview with Vinodh Kumar, M.D., and Komal Shah, M.D.

Dee Dee Wang, M.D., director of structural heart imaging, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, Mich., explains how patient survival depends on keeping the left ventricular outflow track (LVOT) clear and using 3-D imaging to predict what the neo-LVOT will look like prior to transcatheter mitral valve replacement (TMVR) procedures. The close proximity between the aortic and mitral valves in the left ventricle anatomy makes it critical to assess any mitral valve overhang that will obstruct blood flow out of the left ventricle. This issue has been raised in several cardiovascular imaging structural heart intervention planning sessions at conferences over the past two years, most notably at the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography (SCCT).

Read the related article Interventional Imagers: The Conductors of the Heart Team Orchestra, which Wang helped author.

Watch the related VIDEO: Overview of the Henry Ford Hospital Structural Heart Program.

Additional articles and videos on Henry Ford Hospital 

In a keynote lecture at the Society of Breast Imaging (SBI)/American College of Radiology (ACR) 2019 Symposium, Diana Miglioretti, Ph.D., dean’s professor of biostatistics at UC Davis Health, discussed risk-stratified breast cancer screening and its potential to improve the balance of screening benefits to harms by tailoring screening intensity and modality to individual risk factors.

Read the article "How Risk Stratification Might Affect Women’s Health"

Read the article "FDA Proposes New Rules for Mammography Reporting and Quality Improvement"

Watch the VIDEO: A Discussion on Proposed FDA Rules for Mammography Reporting

At the Society of Breast Imaging (SBI)/American College of Radiology (ACR) 2019 Symposium, Rasu Shrestha, M.D., MBA, chief strategy officer for Atrium Health, discusses his new role with Atrium, the hype cycle of artificial intelligence (AI) and the key elements of getting AI in radiology — and in healthcare — right.

Read the article "Atrium Health Debuts Amazon Alexa Skill to Help Patients Access Medical Care"

Listen to the podcast Is Artificial Intelligence The Doom of Radiology?, a discussion with Shrestha.

Vital Images has developed a strategy that allows its customers to capture revenues that are otherwise missed while building the infrastructure for the future. In an interview with itnTV, Vital Images executives Larry Sitka and Geoffrey Clemmons describe how the company has reconciled this vision of the future with near-term realities.

At RSNA 2018, GE Healthcare formally presented Edison as the company's new applications platform, designed to speed the delivery of precision care. 

Related GE Edison Platform Content:

VIDEO: Artificial Intelligence - GE Builds AI Applications on Edison Platform

GE Healthcare Unveils New Applications and Smart Devices Built on Edison Platform

GE launched a new brand that covers artificial intelligence (AI) at the Radiological Socoety of North American (RSNA) 2018 meeting. The company showed several works-in-progress, including a critical care suite of algorithms and experimental applications for brain MR. Each is being built on GE's Edison Platform.

Related GE Edison Platform Content:

GE Healthcare Unveils New Applications and Smart Devices Built on Edison Platform

VIDEO: itnTV Conversations — What is Edison?

William Pinsky, M.D., a pediatric cardiologist and CEO of the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), and Mandeep Mehra, M.D., medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Heart and Vascular Center and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explain the U.S. doctor shortage and how foreign doctors help fill the gap.

According to 2017 data provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), 40 percent of interventional cardiologists, 30 percent of cardiovascular disease specialists, and 26 percent of pediatric cardiologists in the United States are international medical graduates (IMGs). However, as the physician shortage continues to impact primary care doctors, psychiatrists, OB/GYNs, among others, the U.S. also expects to see a shortage of cardiologists within the next 10 years, according to a spotlight cardiology study issued by the professional services firm PYA, which specialized in healthcare consulting.

The interview was shot at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) 2019 meeting.

Deborah Levine, M.D., professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and vice chair for academic affairs in the Department of Radiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, describes scenarios where magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could be more useful than ultrasound in issues with the female pelvis.

Magid Awadalla, MBBS, is an advanced cardiac imaging research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has been involved in an imaging study of cardiac changes from photon radiotherapy in breast cancer patients using serial cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The radiotherapy beams used to treat breast cancer pass close to the neighboring heart, which can cause cardiac cell damage leading to issues like heart failure later on. He spoke on the topic of cardio-oncology at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) 2019 meeting.

As a VNA, GE Healthcare Centricity Clinical Archive weaves together data from many different sources and systems. The cloud-based system, shown at RSNA 2018, offers analytics that can help physicians and administrators make decisions about the many types of data contained in this VNA, just as it can help make the VNA more efficient. 

Related content:

Mike Ciancio, imaging systems administrator at CarolinaEast Health System in North Carolina, explains how newer enterprising imaging software can improve how the backend administration of radiology PACS administration. He spoke at the 2019 Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society at (HIMSS) conference.

Ciancio said newer cloud-based systems allow for easier IT management of the backend of a PACS or enterprise imaging system.

Watch the related VIDEO: A Transformative Approach to Reducing Cost and Complexity at CarolinaEast Health System.

Look through a photo gallery of other new technologies at HIMSS19. 

Find news and videos from HIMSS 2019.

Cree Gaskin, M.D., professor, vice chair and associate chief medical officer, University of Virginia Health System, explains how new technology can be used to improve radiology reports without additional workload. His health system uses a new generation integrated RIS/PACS system that allows URL links and new graphical data presentations to be embedded into radiology reports to make them more interactive. This information can include quantifications, key images from the exam, access to full datasets, 3-D reconstructions and ability to immediately link to prior exams. He spoke is sessions on this topic at the 2019 Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) conference.

Look through a photo gallery of other new technologies at HIMSS19. 

Find news and videos from HIMSS 2019.

This is an example of a 3-D printed pelvis that had multiple hip fractures and a second printed pelvis is from a post surgical repair CT scan, showing the pins and plates in pink. This was on display at the GE Healthcare booth at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) 2019 conference. The files for printing were created from the CT datasets using the AW Advanced Visualization software.

Look through a photo gallery of other new technologies at HIMSS19. 

Find news and videos from HIMSS 2019.

ITN Associate Editor Jeff Zagoudis speaks with Mark Pankuch, Ph.D., director of physics and dosimetry at the Northwestern Medicine Chicago Proton Center, about the differences between proton and photon radiotherapy and his daily operations at the Warrenville, Ill. center.

Andrew Deutsch, M.D., MBA, chairman and CEO of Renaissance Imaging Medical Associates (RIMA), an affiliate of Radiology Partners, describes RIMA’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) based worklist workflow to manage reads across 70 sites and load balance between 120 radiologists. He spoke in sessions on this topic at the 2019 Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society at (HIMSS) conference.  

Deutsch, a nationally respected expert in skeletal radiology and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and in addition to his roles at RIMA, serves as medical director of the imaging departments at Northridge Hospital Medical Center and Valley Presbyterian Hospital.

Look through a photo gallery of other new technologies at HIMSS19. 

Find other news and video from HIMSS 2019. 

Related AI Coverage:

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Steve Holloway, principal analyst and company director for the healthcare market research firm Signify Research, explains the key trends he is seeing in radiology enterprise imaging systems. He spoke to ITN at the 2019 Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society at (HIMSS) conference.  

Additional HIMSS 2019 coverage.

Watch the RSNA 2018 VIDEO: Technology Report — Enterprise Imaging