AI software more than halves hospital's MRI exam times
Experts in Amsterdam have been able to slash their MRI department’s scan times, thanks to artificial intelligence-powered software.
The use of AI in radiology is a hot topic in modern day healthcare, with some of its biggest leaders even going as far recently as to suggest the technology is ready to replace radiologists. Experts at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital are taking a different approach, harnessing the power of AI not for interpretation support, but to drastically reduce its scan times.
"We do not use AI to make a diagnosis or to analyze the images. We still do that ourselves,” explains Doenja Lambregts, MD, PhD, a radiologist at the hospital. “It is always a tool, in which an entire team of radiologists, lab technicians, and engineers remains involved."
Leaders at the hospital have equipped the radiology department’s MRI scanner with a new AI software that essentially fills in the blanks between image slices with synthetic images. This enables technologists to complete patient scans much faster—more than twice as fast as prior to AI integration. Scans of the abdomen that previously took around 23 minutes now are finished within just nine minutes.
Lambregts says that the improved acquisition times do not come at the expense of image quality; in fact, the synthetic images produced by AI are of equal or greater quality due to the lack of motion.
"It is often difficult for patients to lie very still for so long. And there is also a lot of movement in your body,” Lambregts notes. “Your heart, your breathing, your intestines are constantly moving. That causes the images to become blurry. You can't tell your intestines to lie still for a moment."
The MRI department has been able to increase their patient throughput with the software’s help. They now scan an additional 18 patients per week, enabling patients to be seen and treated much sooner than before without having to accomodate the demand with evening and weekend hours.
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In addition to her background in journalism, Hannah also has patient-facing experience in clinical settings, having spent more than 12 years working as a registered rad tech. She began covering the medical imaging industry for Innovate Healthcare in 2021.