England (Commonwealth Union) – Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to play an integral role in our daily lives with the ability to detect patterns and behaviors at super-fast speeds. The introduction of AI that can spontaneously diagnose lung diseases, like tuberculosis and pneumonia, may relieve winter pressures on hospitals, according to University of the West of Scotland (UWS) researchers.
Tuberculosis and pneumonia that may lead to serious infections primarily affect the lungs that regularly need a variety of diagnostic tests, like CT scans, blood tests, X-rays, and ultrasounds. These tests can be costly and time consuming for results.
The UWS produced the revolutionary technology initially created to instantly detect COVID-19 from X-ray images, demonstrated the ability to detect a variety of lung diseases within minutes, with an accuracy of 98%. UWS researcher Professor Naeem Ramzan stated that systems such as this could be essential for busy medical teams across the world.
The technology is expected to be utilized to assist in relieving strain on pressured hospital services with instant and accurate detection of diseases. This can provide some relief to radiographers continuously under pressure; bringing down waiting times for test results; and producing efficiencies within the testing process.
“There is no doubt that hospital departments across the globe are under pressure and the outbreak of Covid-19 exacerbated this, adding further strain to pressured departments and staff. There is a real need for technology that can help ease some of these pressures and detect a range of different diseases quickly and accurately, helping free up valuable staff time,” said Professor Ramzan.
The state-of-the-art technique applies X-ray technology, contrasting scans to a database of 1000s of images from pneumonia, tuberculosis and covid patients. This is followed by a procedure referred to as deep convolutional neural network, that is an algorithm generally applied in analyzing visual imagery for diagnosis.
