American College of Radiology Publishes AI Use Case for COVID-19 Detection
On Wednesday, March 11, the Data Science Institute of the Reston, Va.-based American College of Radiology (ACR) published a use case for the detection of the COVID-19 virus, opening it to the public for comment.
As stated on the ACR’s website, “The ACR® Data Science Institute® (DSI) has published an artificial intelligence (AI) use case on COVID-19, now open for public comment. Expert radiologists rapidly developed the use case to offer the developer community medical context — including necessary inputs, outputs and possible corollary features — for developing an AI solution to detect COVID-19. Patients with the virus present with several unique clinical characteristics. Early published reports suggest an increasing role for chest computed tomography scans in the detection and diagnosis of COVID-19.”
As the announcement on Wednesday noted, “The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, has been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization . The coronavirus is difficult to contain and has been identified in 79 countries as of March 9. Tremendous efforts and funding are needed from governments, health care systems and industry, both in the United States and globally, to boost detection and response operations. AI could help identify early onset of COVID-19 on chest CT, particularly in health care settings without access to many radiologists, according to Eric Stern, M.D., chair of the ACR DSI Thoracic Panel.” And it quoted Dr. Stern as stating that “Such an AI solution may prove to be a very useful application towards COVID-19 diagnosis and containment.”
