Dr Anthony Loschner: Artificial Intelligence Can Benefit Underserved Populations

Artificial intelligence allows underserved populations to gain access to a radiologist by just clicking a snapshot on their cell phone, said Anthony L. Loschner, MD, assistant professor and associate program director, Critical Care Fellowship Program, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, about his presentation at this year’s CHEST meeting.

Transcript

Introduce us to the use of artificial intelligence in pulmonary medicine.

The title of my presentation was “Artificial Intelligence in Pulmonary Medicine: The Rise of the Machines." And we reviewed the major articles that had been published in the last year or so guiding future AI in pulmonary medicine.

There were some reviews that were done, literature reviews, where I reviewed articles on how AI is currently being used. Examples include great work by a Stanford team called ChestNet, and they're using a deep learning algorithm to read chest x-rays on any media pretty much. So you point your cell phone at a chest x- ray, take a picture, upload it, and their AI system can read it pretty accurately for the 14 most common diseases found on chest x-rays.

That's important because it can allow access to care. Radiologists are far in-between, so this allows underserved populations to gain access to a radiologist by just clicking a snapshot on their cell phone and uploading it.