Detecting Pulmonary Embolism from Computed Tomography Using Convolutional Neural Network
This addresses the problem of delayed diagnosis and high costs in PE detection for hospitalized patients, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing deep learning method to a specific medical imaging task.
The study tackled the challenge of diagnosing pulmonary embolism (PE) by using a convolutional neural network to detect PE from chest CT images, enabling immediate scheduling of confirmatory tests and saving over a week of screening time.
The clinical symptoms of pulmonary embolism (PE) are very diverse and non-specific, which makes it difficult to diagnose. In addition, pulmonary embolism has multiple triggers and is one of the major causes of vascular death. Therefore, if it can be detected and treated quickly, it can significantly reduce the risk of death in hospitalized patients. In the detection process, the cost of computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) is high, and angiography requires the injection of contrast agents, which increase the risk of damage to the patient. Therefore, this study will use a deep learning approach to detect pulmonary embolism in all patients who take a CT image of the chest using a convolutional neural network. With the proposed pulmonary embolism detection system, we can detect the possibility of pulmonary embolism at the same time as the patient's first CT image, and schedule the CTPA test immediately, saving more than a week of CT image screening time and providing timely diagnosis and treatment to the patient.