Artificial intelligence for thoracic radiology: From research tool to clinical practice

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents an attractive opportunity for providing decision support to radiologists, who are often overburdened by the ever-increasing number of radiographs that are requested each year. Interpretation errors, reporting delays and backlogs, particularly of chest radiographs (CXR), continue to be a major problem faced by busy radiology departments. Deep learning is a branch of AI that shows particular promise, being proficient at identifying patterns in large quantities of data and mapping these patterns to simple categories, such as diagnosis, without the need for human programming.