Published in the proceedings of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn.—May 31, 2022—Virtual Radiologic (vRad), the leading US teleradiology practice, developed and validated a research-only deep learning (DL) based automatic algorithm to detect thoracic and abdominal aortic aneurysms on contrast and non-contrast CT images. They have compared its performance with assessments obtained from retrospective radiology reports. The DL algorithm was developed using 556 CT scans. Manual annotations of aorta centerlines and cross-sectional aorta boundaries were created to train the algorithm. Aorta segmentation and aneurysm detection performances were evaluated on 2263 retrospective CT scans (154 thoracic and 176 abdominal aneurysms).
Evaluation was performed by comparing the automatically detected aneurysm status to the aneurysm status reported in the radiology reports and the AUC was reported. In addition, a quantitative evaluation was performed to compare the automatically measured aortic diameters to manual diameters on a subset of 59 CT scans. Pearson correlation coefficient was used. For aneurysm detection, the AUC was 0.95 for thoracic aneurysm detection (95% confidence region [0.93, 0.97]) and 0.94 for abdominal aneurysm detection (95% confidence region [0.92, 0.96]). For aortic diameter measurement, the Pearson correlation coefficient was 0.973 (p<0.001).
Read more about this study: https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2607877
About vRad
vRad is the nation’s leading teleradiology practice with 500 U.S. board-certified or eligible physicians, the majority of whom are subspecialty trained. Our practice delivers high-quality diagnostic imaging services to more than 2,100 facilities and radiology groups across the United States. vRad has 23 issued patents for telemedicine and radiology technologies; and is a leading innovator in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, imaging data analytics, and software to improve the quality of patient care, value for our clients, and the experience of our physicians. www.www.vrad.com
