We might be crossing a line these days, as AI is not only taking over some of the radiologists’ work, but also taking over talking about it.
Listen to a podcast, which was generated autonomously by Google NotebookLM, from the pdf of the latest paper on the BoneXpert method for autonomous bone age determination.
The podcast is surprisingly good at summarising the general aspects, but for an exact account of the accuracy, please consult the paper.
The US patent office has granted Visiana a patent for the invention of an image processing method.
A key element of BoneXpert is to locate each bone accurately as a first step in the bone age analysis. Visiana has invented a new method to locate a landmark, e.g. the tip of a bone. About 100 examples are needed for the machine learning method, which trains a decision tree to predict the location from a nearby image patch. The predictions from more than 300 patches are placed in a voting map, and the peak of votes yields the landmark location with subpixel accuracy. The figure shows the voting map for finding the tip of a distal phalanx.
The invention could also be useful in land vehicles and smartphones.
Visiana held its BoneXpert webinar to explore the automation of the processes in radiology that is currently taking place in the UK.
Presenters were Professor Amaka Offiah, and Dr. Alistair Calder who presented their views and findings when using BoneXpert in the daily routine at Sheffield University Hospital and at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
The webinar was well-attended, and here are a some highlights.
Searching PubMed with “BoneXpert” yields 50 publications until the end of 2020.
Until 2017, there were 31 publications of which 18 were coauthored by Visiana.
In 2018-20, there were 19 publication, and none of the them were coauthored by Visiana, marking a shift towards independent validation studies.
30 of the 50 publications were on bone age, 5 were on adult height prediction and a surprisingly large number, 15, were on the Bone Health Index.
Explore the abstracts of these publications here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=bonexpert&filter=years.2009-2020
We are happy to announce that Visiana have moved to a new, larger office on Fremtidsvej 1, not far from our old office, and still within the DTU Science Park.