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National Experts Chart Roadmap for AI in Medical Imaging

A foundational research roadmap for AI in medical imaging was recently published in the journal Radiology. The report was based on outcomes from a workshop to explore the future of AI in medical imaging, featuring experts in the field, and hosted at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The workshop was cosponsored by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, RSNA, the ACR, and the Academy for Radiology and Biomedical Imaging Research.

The collaborative report underscores the commitment by standards bodies, professional societies, governmental agencies, and private industry to work together to accomplish a set of shared goals in service of patients, who stand to benefit from the potential of AI to bring about innovative imaging technologies.

The report describes innovations that would help to produce more publicly available, validated, and reusable data sets against which to evaluate new algorithms and techniques. It notes that, to be useful for machine learning, these data sets require methods to rapidly create labeled or annotated imaging data. The roadmap of priorities for AI in medical imaging research includes the following:

• new image reconstruction methods that efficiently produce images suitable for human interpretation from source data;
• automated image labeling and annotation methods, including information extraction from the imaging report, electronic phenotyping, and prospective structured image reporting;
• new machine learning methods for clinical imaging data, such as tailored, pretrained model architectures and distributed machine learning methods;  
• machine learning methods that can explain the advice they provide to human users, deemed “explainable AI”; and
• validated methods for image deidentification and data sharing to facilitate the wide availability of clinical imaging data sets.