New paper: How do radiologists use BoneXpert?

A questionnaire was sent out to 282 radiologists in Europe using BoneXpert.

The aim was to reveal to what extent radiologists have been replaced by BoneXpert when doing bone age assessment. The result of the survey has now been published as an open access article in Pediatric Radiology. The original questionnaire is in the supplementary information.

The survey resulted in 97 responses, and it showed that the time spent on bone age evaluation was dramatically reduced: Prior to the introduction of BoneXpert, 14% of the respondents used less than 2 minutes, raising to 89% after the introduction.

Another way to estimate the degree of “replacement by Artificial Intelligence (AI)” is to ask how often the automated rating is overridden by the radiologist:

For 40% of the radiologists, the AI has effectively taken over the rating completely, with another 43% of the radiologists changing the rating only rarely. So, when introducing this AI system, which is cleared to be able to handle the rating autonomously, the radiologists are typically not being replaced completely by the AI. Instead, there is a wide spectrum of uses: While a minority has indeed stopped looking at these images, the majority is still looking, but rarely overriding the automated the bone age. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a minority still using more than 2 minutes and overriding the AI more often. Sixty percent of the respondents reported that the reason they are still inspecting the image is to look for other findings such as skeletal dysplasias or Turner Syndrome.

In summary, radiologists have found different ways to incorporate this AI in their workflow in a manner that best suits their needs. Typically, the AI takes over the tedious, quantitative work, freeing time for the radiologist to do a qualitative assessment.