Interstitial lung diseases: evaluation of the performance of a computerized analysis system versus observers

We have been developing a computerized analysis system to detect interstitial lung abnormalities on chest radiographs. In this study, we evaluated the performance of our computerized analysis system and compared it with that of radiologists. The performance of the computerized analysis system was inferior to the mean performance of the chest radiologists. However, the performance of the computerized analysis system was superior to the mean performance of the residents. From our results, the outputs obtained from the computerized analysis system can be used by radiologists as a "second opinion", and this system could be especially useful to obtain quantitative data for follow-up of known interstitial lung diseases.