Developing and assessing an AI-based multi-task prediction system to assist radiologists detecting lung diseases in reading chest x-ray images

Abstract

Chest x-ray radiography (CXR) is widely used in screening and detecting lung diseases. However, reading CXR images is often difficult resulting in diagnostic errors and inter-reader variability. To address this clinical challenge, a Multi-task, Optimal-recommendation, and Max-predictive Classification and Segmentation (MOM-ClaSeg) system is developed to detect and delineate different abnormal regions of interest (ROIs) on CXR, make multiple recommendations of abnormalities sorted by the generated probability scores, and automatically generate diagnostic report. MOM-ClaSeg consists of convolutional neural networks to generate a detection, finer-grained segmentation and prediction score for each ROI based on augmented MaskRCNN framework, and multi-layer perception neural networks to fuse results to generate the optimal recommendation for each detected ROI based on decision fusion framework. Total of 310,333 adult CXR containing 67,071 normal and 243,262 abnormal images depicting 307,415 confirmed ROIs of 65 different abnormalities were assembled as to train MOM-ClaSeg. An independent 22,642 CXR was assembled to test MOMClaSeg. Radiologists detected 6,646 ROIs that depict 43 different types of abnormalities on 4,068 CXR images. Comparing with radiologists’ detection results, MOM-ClaSeg system detected 6,009 true-positive ROIs and 6,379 false-positive ROIs, which represents 90.3% sensitivity and 0.28 false-positive ROIs per image. For the eight common diseases, the computed areas under ROC curves ranged from 0.880 to 0.988. Additionally, 70.4% of MOM-ClaSeg system-detected abnormalities along with system-generated diagnostic reports were directly accepted by radiologists. This study presents the first AI-based multi-task prediction system to detect different abnormalities and generate diagnostic reports to assist radiologists accurately and/or efficiently detecting lung diseases.