Radiologists have long had the capability to scan entire bodies. But identifying all the body’s many internal structures is much harder. Now an AI system can do it instead.
Whole body imaging is a technique that scans a person’s insides for the early warning signs of heart disease, cancer and other worrying conditions. There are various ways to make these scans but the most common uses x-ray to create images of body slices. A computer then fits the images back together to create a 3D model of the whole body.
This can be used to plan certain types of surgery but it is also offered as a kind of screening service to provide piece of mind to health-conscious individuals—at least that’s the promise.
The reality is that whole body CT scans are difficult to analyze, not least because it is hard to identify all the different organs from the mass of tissues that make up the human body. So physicians have turned to computer vision systems to do the job instead.
The task is to identify the organs, structure and bones, as well as their three-dimensional shape using the data from the scan. However, the current crop of algorithms do not work particularly well, say Jakob Wasserthal and colleagues at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland.
Continue reading… “The AI Vision System Set to Revolutionize Whole Body Scans”
