Prolific UK-based radiographer, Nick Woznitza, in response to the latest study showing the benefits of radiographer interpretations.

Imaging Wire Sponsors

annalise.ai  •  Arterys  •  Bayer  •  Blackford  •  Canon Medical  •  CARPL.ai  •  Change Healthcare  •  Enlitic  •  GE Healthcare  •  Hyperfine  •  Intelerad  •  Novarad  •  Riverain Technologies  •  Siemens Healthineers  •  United Imaging  •  Us2.ai

Medical Imaging

Canon’s Meaningful RSNA Innovations

After taking a virtual approach to RSNA last year, Canon Medical Systems made its presence felt at RSNA 2022, unveiling an interactive “digital patient journey” booth that featured an interesting mix of new products and business model innovations. 

SP MRIs – Canon unveiled SP-suffix configurations of its Vantage Orian and Galan MRIs (1.5T & 3T), adding new features intended to enhance MRI team efficiency (tablet UX interface, intelligent Ceiling Camera), while making a number of its image quality and productivity-focused solutions standard (AiCE DLR, Fast 3D acceleration, ForeSee View automation).

Mobile XR – The new Mobirex i9 brings a rare update to Canon’s U.S. mobile X-ray lineup, launching with an emphasis on its small size, mobile/flexible design, and its use of Canon’s next-gen CXDI-Elite wireless detectors.

Mobile MI – In a different type of mobile expansion, Canon launched a mobile version of its Cartesion Prime Digital PET/CT, which seems to be a good fit for mobile coaches given its Air Cooled technology and small footprint (fits in 3.15×7.1 meters).

Future Proof Packages – Canon rolled out its interesting new Non-Obsolescence Program, which allows CT and MRI customers to purchase an up-front package that gives them access to all future hardware, software, and service options as they become available. The program covers five years of upgrades, and is priced well below what users would pay if they ordered each item individually.

Glassbeam Clinsights – Canon’s Inclusive Analytics Suite added Glassbeam Clinsights Utilization Analytics, which analyzes DICOM and HL7 data to help Canon service customers understand imaging utilization and productivity levels across their fleets (multi-modalities and vendors).

AI’s Healthcare System Value

AI delivers value to a wide range of healthcare stakeholders, but its primary value to health systems originate from its ability to automate tasks, democratize care, and deliver hard and soft ROI. See how these factors impact health systems’ bottom line in this latest Arterys report.

What it Means to be Built for the Modern World

Find out what built for the modern world means — and why it matters — in this Aunt Minnie profile on United Imaging’s more modern approach to vertical integration, leadership, and culture.

The Wire

• Adding Radiographer Interpretations: Combining radiographer and emergency clinician interpretations improves diagnostic accuracy when radiologists aren’t available (in regions where radiographers read images). That’s from an Australian study that had radiographers and ED clinicians interpret 838 X-ray exams during clinical practice, finding that the radiographers rivaled the clinicians’ sensitivity (80% vs. 82%), specificity (98% vs. 95%), and accuracy (92% vs. 89%), and then they combined to produce even stronger results (90%, 93%, 92%). This comes a few weeks after another study showed radiographer interpretations can significantly improve lung cancer diagnosis turnaround times.

• Ultromics EchoGo HF FDA: Ultromics announced the FDA clearance of its EchoGo Heart Failure solution, which identifies patients with Heart Failure with preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF) using a single echo image. This appears to be a high-priority product for Ultromics, which got its start with AI-automated echo reporting, but has focused more of its efforts and messaging on heart failure throughout 2022. That shift is understandable, given HFpEF’s prevalence, historic challenges diagnosing the disease, and improving heart failure treatment options.

• Stable Diffusion Sythetic CXR: A team of Stanford researchers found that Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion text-to-image model (creates images based on text prompts) can be used to generate synthetic medical images, potentially revealing a way to address imaging AI’s training data challenges (particularly for rare diseases). Following “minor tweaks” and training with 1k chest X-rays and a database of 1M general text prompts, the Stable Diffusion model was able to create synthetic CXRs from text prompts “surprisingly well.” 

• The Medical Imaging Nine: Nine medical imaging companies scored a spot on CBInsights’ Digital Health 150 list, bringing interesting changes from last year’s 13 imaging brands. CBInsights downsized its field of ultrasound-related startups (from 5 to 2; Clarius & Ligence), while shifting away from traditional triage/detection AI companies to a diverse group of AI startups focused on comprehensive AI (Harrison.ai / Annalise.ai), triage with care coordination (Viz.ai), reconstruction (Subtle Medical), data standardization (Enlitic), risk assessment (Optellum), and brain MRI workflows (BrainSightAI & Cerebriu). For complete analysis of the other 141 companies, check out this Digital Health Wire deep dive.

• Leveljump Acquires in Alberta: Leveljump Healthcare continued its Canadian imaging center expansion, acquiring four Alberta imaging clinics for $5.88M. Leveljump previously focused on teleradiology, but has acquired or opened at least ten new imaging centers since September 2021.

• Medical Jargon Confusion: A JAMA study revealed not-too-surprisingly that medical jargon confuses patients, frequently resulting in them “understanding” clinical communications in a way that’s the exact opposite of what was intended. Although 96% of the 215 respondents knew that having a negative cancer screening meant they did not have cancer, only 67% knew that “positive nodes” meant that the cancer had spread. Radiology was well represented among many of the paper’s top phrases to avoid, including “unremarkable” and “impressive” X-rays and “grossly intact” neuro exams.

• November Jobs Report: The U.S. healthcare sector added 45k jobs in November, with ambulatory services, hospitals, and nursing and residential care facilities leading the job gains (23k, 11k, 10k). Although November’s hiring slowed by 17% versus October, healthcare employment appears to be in a much better spot this year than last, adding an average of 47k new jobs each month (vs. 9k per month last year).

• Heart Ultrasomics: Authors of a JACC study developed an AI model that successfully extracted cardiac ultrasonic textural features from echo images to assess LV structure and function. Developed with cardiac ultrasound images from 1.9k subjects, the “ultrasomics” model successfully predicted LV remodeling in an external dataset of 484 subjects (AUC: 0.78-0.79), while its ultrasomics probability score independently predicted MACE (HR: 8.53). The tool could potentially facilitate image triage and management, and add to the size and function measurements of standard echos. 

• Viz.ai Adds Cercare Perfusion: Viz.ai further expanded its neuro AI portfolio, adding Cercare Medical’s Cercare Perfusion solution, which automates brain CT and MRI perfusion map generation to support neurovascular treatment decision making. Cercare continues Viz.ai’s expansion beyond initial detection/coordination to include downstream assessment/treatment support, which seems to be becoming a more common strategy among AI platforms that initially focused on triage AI.

• Provider Burnout Leveling Off: Provider burnout levels might finally be leveling off, with the percentage of clinicians reporting burnout holding steady at 34% since 2021. A KLAS survey from 181 provider orgs (27k clinicians) indicates that several stressors impacting burnout have begun to ease since the peak of the pandemic, including too much time spent on bureaucratic tasks (falling from 48% to 42%), high after-hours workload (42% to 38%), and EHR / IT tools hurting efficiency (38% to 33%).

Democratizing Enterprise Imaging

Enterprise imaging is mainly adopted in the largest hospitals, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Check out this Imaging Wire Show featuring Novarad product leader Dave GrandPre, where we discuss what’s caused this divide and why smaller hospitals should adopt enterprise imaging.

Making Echo Accurate, Efficient, and Accessible

Check out this Imaging Wire Show featuring Us2.ai’s co-founders – James Hare and Dr. Carolyn Lam – for a great discussion about Us2.ai’s continued clinical and commercial expansion, and their efforts to improve echocardiography accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility.

The Resource Wire

• It says a lot when a solution works so well for a radiology department that they decide to perform a study to quantify its benefits. In this Imaging Wire Q&A, University Hospital of Zurich’s Thomas Frauenfelder discusses his experience and study on Riverain Technologies ClearRead CT.

• A recent Nature paper detailed how Yale’s successful deployment of Hyperfine’s Swoop portable MRI allowed “for a reversal in the clinical paradigm,” while achieving accurate ICH detection and demonstrating its ease-of-use in ICU environments. Explore the study’s other key takeaways and next steps in this Hyperfine summary.

• Working out your AI business case? Check out this helpful Blackford Analysis post detailing how to create your AI Value Matrix based on your organizational objectives and value indicators.

• We may be entering a third wave of imaging AI’s rapid evolution, that brings a shift from narrow point solutions to comprehensive multi-finding AI systems. Join this discussion with annalise.ai Chief Medical Officer, Rick Abramson, MD, exploring how this transition could take place, how radiologist and VC perspectives on AI are changing, and how AI might continue to evolve in the future.

• Enlitic’s Curie|ENDEX software conforms messy metadata to a standard convention, making radiology data searchable and hanging protocols more reliable. And as Enlitic’s new ROI calculator shows, those imaging efficiencies create notable time and cost savings.

• Can you tell which of these images are from a 3T MRI and which are from a 1.5T scanner and enhanced with Canon’s AiCE Deep Learning Reconstruction? Take the AiCE Challenge to find out.

• Check out this GE Healthcare perspective on imaging AI’s adoption evolution, the AI ecosystem shift, and the importance of seamless AI integration.

• Change Healthcare’s cloud-native, zero-footprint Stratus Imaging PACS is live in clinical use. See how Stratus Imaging PACS is helping radiology practices improve productivity and patient care, while eliminating the cost and resource constraints of on-premise systems.

• Relive RSNA 2022 with this Imaging Wire Show, featuring Bayer Radiology’s Barbara Ruhland. We reflect on radiology’s major themes and trends since the last RSNA, how they affected this year’s conversations, and how Bayer is supporting imaging teams’ changing needs.

• The cloud will play a foundational role for a variety of healthcare applications, but perhaps one of its biggest impacts will be in supporting patient-centered care. Explore how the cloud will prove critical for ensuring patient-centered care in this editorial by Intelerad’s Morris Panner.

• Siemens Healthineers’ NAEOTOM Alpha made headlines as the world’s first photon-counting CT system, a technology that’s poised to redefine CT imaging. Check out this whitepaper detailing how the NAEOTOM Alpha’s unique resolution, contrast-to-noise ratio, and spectral sensitivity advantages could change CT forever.

• Imaging AI is evolving fast, but radiology leaders’ expectations for their AI technologies might be evolving even faster. In this Imaging Wire Show with Dr. Charlene Liew of SingHealth and Dr. Nina Kottler of Radiology Partners, we explore radiology leaders’ current and future expectations for AI, and the central role platforms play in their AI roadmaps.