The role of artificial intelligence in clinical imaging and workflows

Evidence-based medicine, outcomes management, and multidisciplinary systems are laying the foundation for radiology on the cusp of a new day. Environmental and operational forces coupled with technological advancements are redefining the veterinary radiologist of tomorrow. In the past several years, veterinary image volumes have exploded, and the scale of hardware and software required to support it seems boundless. The most dynamic trend within veterinary radiology is implementing digital information systems such as PACS, RIS, PIMS, and Voice Recognition systems. While the digitization of radiography imaging has significantly improved the workflow of the veterinary radiology assistant and radiologist, tedious, redundant tasks are abundant and mind-numbing. They can lead to errors with a significant impact on patient care.  Today, these boring and repetitious tasks continue to bog down patient throughput and workflow. Artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, shows much promise to rocket the workflow and veterinary clinical imaging into a new day where the AI management of mundane tasks allows for efficiency so the radiologist can better concentrate on the quality of patient care. In this article, we briefly discuss the major subsets of artificial intelligence (AI) workflow for the radiologist and veterinary radiology assistant including image acquisition, segmentation and mensuration, rotation and hanging protocol, detection and prioritization, monitoring and registration of lesions, implementation of these subsets, and the ethics of utilizing AI in veterinary medicine.