Les Folio

Iryna Hartsock, Cyrillo Araujo, Les Folio et al.

Radiology reports are often lengthy and unstructured, posing challenges for referring physicians to quickly identify critical imaging findings while increasing the risk of missed information. This retrospective study aimed to enhance radiology reports by making them concise and well-structured, with findings organized by relevant organs. To achieve this, we utilized private large language models (LLMs) deployed locally within our institution's firewall, ensuring data security and minimizing computational costs. Using a dataset of 814 radiology reports from seven board-certified body radiologists at Moffitt Cancer Center, we tested five prompting strategies within the LangChain framework. After evaluating several models, the Mixtral LLM demonstrated superior adherence to formatting requirements compared to alternatives like Llama. The optimal strategy involved condensing reports first and then applying structured formatting based on specific instructions, reducing verbosity while improving clarity. Across all radiologists and reports, the Mixtral LLM reduced redundant word counts by more than 53%. These findings highlight the potential of locally deployed, open-source LLMs to streamline radiology reporting. By generating concise, well-structured reports, these models enhance information retrieval and better meet the needs of referring physicians, ultimately improving clinical workflows.

Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman, Gregg Cohen, Lillian Spear et al.

Chest X-ray (CXR) is a widely performed radiology examination that helps to detect abnormalities in the tissues and organs in the thoracic cavity. Detecting pulmonary abnormalities like COVID-19 may become difficult due to that they are obscured by the presence of bony structures like the ribs and the clavicles, thereby resulting in screening/diagnostic misinterpretations. Automated bone suppression methods would help suppress these bony structures and increase soft tissue visibility. In this study, we propose to build an ensemble of convolutional neural network models to suppress bones in frontal CXRs, improve classification performance, and reduce interpretation errors related to COVID-19 detection. The ensemble is constructed by (i) measuring the multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM) score between the sub-blocks of the bone-suppressed image predicted by each of the top-3 performing bone-suppression models and the corresponding sub-blocks of its respective ground truth soft-tissue image, and (ii) performing a majority voting of the MS-SSIM score computed in each sub-block to identify the sub-block with the maximum MS-SSIM score and use it in constructing the final bone-suppressed image. We empirically determine the sub-block size that delivers superior bone suppression performance. It is observed that the bone suppression model ensemble outperformed the individual models in terms of MS-SSIM and other metrics. A CXR modality-specific classification model is retrained and evaluated on the non-bone-suppressed and bone-suppressed images to classify them as showing normal lungs or other COVID-19-like manifestations. We observed that the bone-suppressed model training significantly outperformed the model trained on non-bone-suppressed images toward detecting COVID-19 manifestations.

Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman, Ghada Zamzmi, Les Folio et al.

Chest X-rays are the most commonly performed diagnostic examination to detect cardiopulmonary abnormalities. However, the presence of bony structures such as ribs and clavicles can obscure subtle abnormalities, resulting in diagnostic errors. This study aims to build a deep learning-based bone suppression model that identifies and removes these occluding bony structures in frontal CXRs to assist in reducing errors in radiological interpretation, including DL workflows, related to detecting manifestations consistent with tuberculosis (TB). Several bone suppression models with various deep architectures are trained and optimized using the proposed combined loss function and their performances are evaluated in a cross-institutional test setting. The best-performing model is used to suppress bones in the publicly available Shenzhen and Montgomery TB CXR collections. A VGG-16 model is pretrained on a large collection of publicly available CXRs. The CXR-pretrained model is then fine-tuned individually on the non-bone-suppressed and bone-suppressed CXRs of Shenzhen and Montgomery TB CXR collections to classify them as showing normal lungs or TB manifestations. The performances of these models are compared using several performance metrics, analyzed for statistical significance, and their predictions are qualitatively interpreted through class-selective relevance maps. It is observed that the models trained on bone-suppressed CXRs significantly outperformed (p<0.05) the models trained on the non-bone-suppressed CXRs. Models trained on bone-suppressed CXRs improved detection of TB-consistent findings and resulted in compact clustering of the data points in the feature space signifying that bone suppression improved the model sensitivity toward TB classification.

Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman, Les Folio, Jane Dimperio et al.

Deep learning (DL) has drawn tremendous attention in object localization and recognition for both natural and medical images. U-Net segmentation models have demonstrated superior performance compared to conventional handcrafted feature-based methods. Medical image modality-specific DL models are better at transferring domain knowledge to a relevant target task than those that are pretrained on stock photography images. This helps improve model adaptation, generalization, and class-specific region of interest (ROI) localization. In this study, we train chest X-ray (CXR) modality-specific U-Nets and other state-of-the-art U-Net models for semantic segmentation of tuberculosis (TB)-consistent findings. Automated segmentation of such manifestations could help radiologists reduce errors and supplement decision-making while improving patient care and productivity. Our approach uses the publicly available TBX11K CXR dataset with weak TB annotations, typically provided as bounding boxes, to train a set of U-Net models. Next, we improve the results by augmenting the training data with weak localizations, post-processed into an ROI mask, from a DL classifier that is trained to classify CXRs as showing normal lungs or suspected TB manifestations. Test data are individually derived from the TBX11K CXR training distribution and other cross-institutional collections including the Shenzhen TB and Montgomery TB CXR datasets. We observe that our augmented training strategy helped the CXR modality-specific U-Net models achieve superior performance with test data derived from the TBX11K CXR training distribution as well as from cross-institutional collections (p < 0.05).