Abstract:Evaluating canine electrocardiograms (ECG) require skilled veterinarians, but current availability of veterinary cardiologists for ECG interpretation and diagnostic support is limited. Developing tools for automated assessment of ECG sequences can improve veterinary care by providing clinicians real-time results and decision support tools. We implement a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) approach for classifying canine electrocardiogram sequences as either normal or abnormal. ECG records are converted into 8 second Lead II sequences and classified as either normal (no evidence of cardiac abnormalities) or abnormal (presence of one or more cardiac abnormalities). For training ECG sequences are randomly augmented using RandomAugmentECG, a new augmentation library implemented specifically for this project. Each chunk is then is converted using a continuous wavelet transform into a 2D scalogram. The 2D scalogram are then classified as either normal or abnormal by a binary CNN classifier. Experimental results are validated against three boarded veterinary cardiologists achieving an AUC-ROC score of 0.9506 on test dataset matching human level performance. Additionally, we describe model deployment to Microsoft Azure using an MLOps approach. To our knowledge, this work is one of the first attempts to implement a deep learning model to automatically classify ECG sequences for canines.Implementing automated ECG classification will enhance veterinary care through improved diagnostic performance and increased clinic efficiency.
Abstract:Chest X-ray images are commonly used in medical diagnosis, and AI models have been developed to assist with the interpretation of these images. However, many of these models rely on information from a single view of the X-ray, while multiple views may be available. In this work, we propose a novel approach for combining information from multiple views to improve the performance of X-ray image classification. Our approach is based on the use of a convolutional neural network to extract feature maps from each view, followed by an attention mechanism implemented using a Vision Transformer. The resulting model is able to perform multi-label classification on 41 labels and outperforms both single-view models and traditional multi-view classification architectures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on a dataset of 363,000 X-ray images.
Abstract:Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having a tremendous impact across most areas of science. Applications of AI in healthcare have the potential to improve our ability to detect, diagnose, prognose, and intervene on human disease. For AI models to be used clinically, they need to be made safe, reproducible and robust, and the underlying software framework must be aware of the particularities (e.g. geometry, physiology, physics) of medical data being processed. This work introduces MONAI, a freely available, community-supported, and consortium-led PyTorch-based framework for deep learning in healthcare. MONAI extends PyTorch to support medical data, with a particular focus on imaging, and provide purpose-specific AI model architectures, transformations and utilities that streamline the development and deployment of medical AI models. MONAI follows best practices for software-development, providing an easy-to-use, robust, well-documented, and well-tested software framework. MONAI preserves the simple, additive, and compositional approach of its underlying PyTorch libraries. MONAI is being used by and receiving contributions from research, clinical and industrial teams from around the world, who are pursuing applications spanning nearly every aspect of healthcare.
Abstract:This work describes the development and real-world deployment of a deep learning-based AI system for evaluating canine and feline radiographs across a broad range of findings and abnormalities. We describe a new semi-supervised learning approach that combines NLP-derived labels with self-supervised training leveraging more than 2.5 million x-ray images. Finally we describe the clinical deployment of the model including system architecture, real-time performance evaluation and data drift detection.