Integrating AI into radiology workflow: levels of research, production, and feedback maturity

We present a roadmap for integrating artificial intelligence (AI)-based image analysis algorithms into existing radiology workflows such that (1) radiologists can significantly benefit from enhanced automation in various imaging tasks due to AI, and (2) radiologists’ feedback is utilized to further improve the AI application. This is achieved by establishing three maturity levels where (1) research enables the visualization of AI-based results/annotations by radiologists without generating new patient records; (2) production allows the AI-based system to generate results stored in an institution’s picture-archiving and communication system; and (3) feedback equips radiologists with tools for editing the AI inference results for periodic retraining of the deployed AI systems, thereby allowing continuous organic improvement of AI-based radiology-workflow solutions. A case study (i.e., detection of brain metastases with T1-weighted contrast-enhanced three-dimensional MRI) illustrates the deployment details of a particular AI-based application according to the aforementioned maturity levels. It is shown that the given AI application significantly improves with feedback coming from radiologists; the number of incorrectly detected brain metastases (false positives) decreases from 14.2 to 9.12 per patient with the number of subsequently annotated datasets increasing from 93 to 217 as a result of radiologist adjudication.