Artificial intelligence in nuclear medicine

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds great promise for advancing diagnostics and treatment in nuclear medicine. The rapid growth of AI over the past decade has been largely driven by advances in hardware components such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and the introduction of deep learning (DL) and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The integration of AI and medical imaging has the potential to revolutionize nuclear medicine by, for example, accelerating image acquisition, enhancing image quality, enabling advanced image generation, assisting image interpretation, and aiding treatment planning. Clinical applications have been demonstrated for most medical specialties, including oncology, neurology, and radionuclide therapy. The utilization of AI to provide automated, standardized procedures can help bring advanced imaging from major university centres to smaller local clinics, thus benefiting a broader range of patients. Additionally, AI has vast potential for predicting optimal treatment strategies, assessing risk, optimizing patient flow and outcomes, and even improving productivity, but these capabilities have yet to be fully utilized. The fraction of clinical AI applications in general healthcare reaching beyond the prototyping phase is reported to be as low as 2%. Indeed, in nuclear medicine, very few AI developments have reached commercial maturity. Currently, most AI applications in nuclear medicine follow the imaging flow from image acquisition and reconstruction, post-processing and image preparation, image analysis, and decision support for clinical interpretation. Below, we will briefly review selected areas and comment on challenges and opportunities for AI in nuclear medicine, with a special focus on the transition from development to clinical implementation.