A New Algorithm Can Spot Pneumonia Better Than a Radiologist

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A New Algorithm Can Spot Pneumonia Better Than a Radiologist

Add diagnosing dangerous lung diseases to the growing list of things artificial intelligence can do better than humans.

A new Arxiv paper by researchers from Stanford explains how CheXNet, the convolutional neural network they developed, achieved the feat. CheXNet was trained on a publicly available dataset of more than 100,000 chest X-rays that were annotated with information on 14 different diseases that turn up in the images. The researchers had four radiologists go through and diagnose a test set of X-rays, which were compared to diagnoses performed by CheXNet. Not only did CheXNet beat radiologists at spotting pneumonia, but once the algorithm was expanded, it proved better at identifying the other 13 diseases as well.

Early detection of pneumonia could help prevent some of the 50,000 deaths per year in the U.S. It is also the single largest infectious cause of death for children worldwide, killing almost a million children under the age of five in 2015.

Andrew Ng, a co-author of the paper and the former head of AI research at Baidu, thinks AI is going to become more and more relied upon in medicine. He previously worked on an algorithm that can, after being trained on electrocardiogram (ECG) data, identify heart arrhythmias better than a human expert. Another deep learning algorithm recently published in Nature was able to spot cancerous skin lesions just as well as a board-certified dermatologist.

Radiologists in particular have been on notice for a while. Previous research has shown that AI is as good or better than doctors at spotting problems in CT scans. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founding fathers of deep learning, told the New Yorker that because of the advances in AI, medical schools “should stop training radiologists now.” Analyzing image-based datasets like X-rays, CT scans, and medical photos is what deep learning algorithms excel at. And they could very well save lives.

Black and white photo of two men looking at chest x-rays
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