The promise and limitations of artificial intelligence in musculoskeletal imaging

This report describes the process of radiomics, its challenges, and its potential power to facilitate better clinical decision making, particularly in the care of patients with cancer.

What has happened in machine learning lately, and what does it mean for the future of medical image analysis? Machine learning has witnessed a tremendous amount of attention over the last few years. The current boom started around 2009 when so-called deep artificial neural networks began outperforming other established models on a number of important benchmarks. Deep neural networks are now the state-of-the-art machine learning models across a variety of areas, from image analysis to natural language processing, and widely deployed in academia and industry. These developments have a huge potential for medical imaging technology, medical data analysis, medical diagnostics and healthcare in general, slowly being realized. We provide a short overview of recent advances and some associated challenges in machine learning applied to medical image processing and image analysis. As this has become a very broad and fast expanding field we will not survey the entire landscape of applications, but put particular focus on deep learning in MRI. Our aim is threefold: (i) give a brief introduction to deep learning with pointers to core references; (ii) indicate how deep learning has been applied to the entire MRI processing chain, from acquisition to image retrieval, from segmentation to disease prediction; (iii) provide a starting point for people interested in experimenting and perhaps contributing to the field of deep learning for medical imaging by pointing out good educational resources, state-of-the-art open-source code, and interesting sources of data and problems related medical imaging. Show more

Radiomics is a quantitative approach to medical imaging, which aims at enhancing the existing data available to clinicians by means of advanced mathematical analysis. Through mathematical extraction of the spatial distribution of signal intensities and pixel interrelationships, radiomics quantifies textural information by using analysis methods from the field of artificial intelligence. Various studies from different fields in imaging have been published so far, highlighting the potential of radiomics to enhance clinical decision-making. However, the field faces several important challenges, which are mainly caused by the various technical factors influencing the extracted radiomic features. The aim of the present review is twofold: first, we present the typical workflow of a radiomics analysis and deliver a practical “how-to” guide for a typical radiomics analysis. Second, we discuss the current limitations of radiomics, suggest potential improvements, and summarize relevant literature on the subject. Show more