Amid the dozens of imaging AI papers and presentations that came out over the last few weeks were three compelling new studies highlighting how much “unseen” information AI can extract from medical images, and the massive impact this information could have.
Imaging-Led Population Health – An excellent presentation from Ayis Pyrros, MD placed radiology at the center of healthcare’s transition to value-based care and population health, highlighting the AI training opportunities that will come with more value-based care HCC codes and imaging AI’s untapped potential for early disease detection and management. Dr. Pyrros specifically emphasized chest X-ray’s potential given the exam’s ubiquity (26M Medicare CXRs in 2021), CXR AI’s ability to predict outcomes (e.g. mortality, comorbidities, hospital stays), and how opportunistic AI screening can/should support proactive care that benefits both patients and health systems.
- Healthcare’s value-based overhaul has traditionally been seen as a threat to radiology’s fee-for-service foundations. Even if that might still be true from a business model perspective, Dr. Pyrros makes it quite clear that the shift to value-based care could make radiology even more important — and importance is always good for business.
AI Race Detection – The final peer-reviewed version of the landmark study showing that AI models can accurately predict patient race was officially published, further confirming that AI can detect patients’ self-reported race by analyzing medical image features. The new paper showed that AI very accurately detects patient race across modalities and anatomical regions (AUCs: CXRs 0.91 – 0.99, chest CT 0.89 – 0.96, mammography 0.81), without relying on proxies or imaging-related confounding features (BMI, disease distribution, and breast density all had ≤0.61 AUCs).
- If imaging AI models intended for clinical tasks can identify patients’ races, they could be applying the same racial biomarkers to diagnosis, thus reproducing or exacerbating healthcare’s existing racial disparities. That’s an important takeaway whether you’re developing or adopting AI.
CXR Cost Predictions – The smart folks at the UCSF Center for Intelligent Imaging developed a series of CXR-based deep learning models that can predict patients’ future healthcare costs. Developed with 21,872 frontal CXRs from 19,524 patients, the best performing models were able to relatively accurately identify which patients would have a top-50% personal healthcare cost after one, three, and five years (AUCs: 0.806, 0.771, 0.729).
- Although predicting which patients will have higher costs could be useful on its own, these findings also suggest that similar CXR-based DL models could be used to flag patients who may deteriorate, initiate proactive care, or support healthcare cost analysis and policies.
