Healthcare professionals with no experience in lung ultrasound were able to acquire diagnostic-quality scans comparable to those of experts thanks to AI guidance in a new paper in JAMA Cardiology.
Ultrasound is one of the most versatile and cost-effective imaging modalities, but it is operator-dependent and many of its more challenging clinical applications require highly trained personnel.
- Echocardiography AI has already been shown to help novice healthcare personnel improve their skill to that of expert users – could AI also have applications in other areas, like lung ultrasound?
To find out, researchers used Caption Health’s AI technology to guide lung ultrasound scans in 176 patients with clinical concerns for pulmonary edema from July to December 2023.
- Patients were scanned twice, once by an expert in lung ultrasound without AI guidance and once by a healthcare professional (registered nurses or medical assistants without formal ultrasound training) who received a short training session with lung guidance AI software.
In analyzing the results, the researchers found …
- Nearly all the scans acquired by healthcare professionals with AI assistance were of diagnostic quality.
- There was no statistically significant difference in quality between scans acquired by healthcare personnel and those of experts (98% vs. 97%, p=0.31).
- AI-aided personnel actually performed better than experts in the lung area around the heart (91% vs. 77%), perhaps due to AI guidance.
- At 15 minutes, median scan acquisition times were longer than those reported in the literature (six and eight minutes).
The findings could have major implications around access-to-care issues, with handheld ultrasound scanners distributed to low-resource areas where AI-guided healthcare professionals could perform scans sent to tertiary care centers for interpretation.
- It should be noted that the researchers received funding for the study from Caption Health (acquired by GE HealthCare in early 2023), as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has supported AI-powered POCUS research in Africa.
The Takeaway
The new study demonstrates an exciting use case for AI in ultrasound that builds on previous research in echo AI. By giving more healthcare professionals access to the power of ultrasound, it promises to democratize access to care in many resource-challenged areas.
