Rick Abramson, Chief Medical Officer at AI company Annalise, came back on the plenary lecture he delivered at ECR2024 and explained his vision in an interview with Mélisande Rouger in Vienna.
‘There’s a boundary that’s moving, it always has been moving, it’s moving now, and it will continue to move,’ he said in reference to his lecture’s title, The Analog Digital Frontier. ‘So we radiologists need to be engaging at that frontier to help nudge it in the right directions.’
Abramson talked about AI applications in real world clinical settings, and some of the challenges radiologists may face realizing the full potential of the technology.
Annalise is engaging at that frontier and working in partnerships with radiologists to extend radiologists’ capacity through automation, he explained.
‘We’re trying to accomplish this mission in a very stepwise fashion in order to remain safe and responsible in our advancement of technology,’ he said. ‘Two years ago, we delivered a comprehensive decision support tool for chest x-ray and we followed that with a comprehensive decision support tool for CT brain.’
Draft reporting
Early 2023, Annalise announced the next step on its roadmap: automating draft reporting. ‘We’re very excited about this, because this should really deliver an exponential increase in efficiency to radiologists, should really help in their workflows, and should help alleviate a lot of the pressures that radiologists are under due to the incredible volume challenges that we face,’ he said.
As for draft reporting, reports should be anchored in a middle layer of truth that’s explainable, testable, verifiable, he insisted.
‘What we do is we’re taking images, putting them through our comprehensive decision support model, which has been validated and tested, making sure that there is that middle layer of truth, and from that middle layer of truth, then we can create the reports,’ he said.
This approach is much more valuable to the radiologists, both clinically and also in terms of efficiency, because it means a lot fewer reports that radiologists are going to have to erase and then redictate.
Besides Europe, Annalise is growing in Australia, the Pacific region, the Middle East, and will soon announce new wins in the UK. The company has also launched its triage product in the United States last November.
