Off‐site Smartphone vs. Standard Workstation in the Radiographic Diagnosis of Small Intestinal Mechanical Obstruction in Dogs and Cats

Abstract

Off-site consultations by board-certified veterinary radiologists benefit residents and emergency clinicians by providing immediate feedback and potentially improving patient outcome. Smartphone devices and compressed images transmitted by email or text greatly facilitate availability of these off-site consultations. Criticism of a smartphone interface for off-site consultation is mostly directed at image degradation relative to the standard radiographic viewing room and monitors. The purpose of this retrospective, cross-sectional, methods comparison study was to compare the accuracy of abdominal radiographs in two imaging interfaces (Joint Photographic Experts Group, off-site, smartphone vs. Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine, on-site, standard workstation) for the diagnosis of small intestinal mechanical obstruction in vomiting dogs and cats. Two board-certified radiologists graded randomized abdominal radiographs using a five-point Likert scale for the presence of mechanical obstruction in 100 dogs or cats presenting for vomiting. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curves for both imaging interfaces was high. The accuracy of the smartphone and traditional workstation was not statistically significantly different for either reviewer (P = 0.384 and P = 0.536). Correlation coefficients were 0.821 and 0.705 for each reviewer when the same radiographic study was viewed in different formats. Accuracy differences between radiologists were potentially related to years of experience. We conclude that off-site expert consultation with a smartphone provides an acceptable interface for accurate diagnosis of small intestinal mechanical obstruction in dogs and cat.

Reliability of smartphone‐based radiographic interpretation for evaluating cardiogenic pulmonary oedema in dogs

“…Similar results were observed by Noel et al . (); however, in that study evaluations were made by veterinarians with varying degrees of experience while in our study the evaluators had equivalent periods of training, although in different specialties.…”

“…In this study, the type of display and image format used to assess thoracic radiographs had no apparent impact and these results are similar to those of a study that investigated small intestinal obstruction, which also concluded that the size of the viewing screens did not affect the final diagnosis (Noel et al . ). Of note, viewing of JPEG images on a smartphone results in loss of image quality so that some detail could be lost (Norweck et al .…”

“…However, there were differences between observers in accordance with the level of individual experience (Noel et al . ).…”

Comparison of error rates between four pretrained DenseNet convolutional neural network models and 13 board‐certified veterinary radiologists when evaluating 15 labels of canine thoracic radiographs

“…It is unclear if using radiographs in a jpeg format may have hindered the veterinary radiologists' performance, though the currently available limited study on this matter seems to indicate otherwise. 39 Another technical consideration is that the performances presented in this paper result from In conclusion, this study evaluates objectively the error rates of four CNNs when compared to 13 board-certified veterinary radiologists, using a ground truth consisting of three board-certified veterinary radiologists using the majority rule. Each of the CNNs performed differently, and while for only one of 15 labels did two of the four CNNs outperform the veterinary radiologists, the veterinary radiologists had a statistically lower error rate than all four CNNs overall and for five specific radiographic labels (33%).…”

Veterinary Telemedicine: A literature review

“…There were no statistical differences in accuracy based on the device used. The only accuracy differences appeared to come from the years of experience the radiologist had, with the more experienced radiologist obtaining a higher degree of accuracy (Noel et al, 2016).…”