Background/introduction
Medical imaging is a powerful clinical tool that allows health professionals to diagnose their patients without subjecting them to invasive surgery. Although the benefits of medical imaging exams are significant, there are ionizing radiation risks associated with every imaging exam that needs to be considered. Existing cancer risk models such as the linear-no-threshold (LNT) model [1] extrapolate the risk from high radiation exposure to the low-dose radiation emitted by medical imaging (Fig. 1). However, the effect of radiation risk from high to low levels remains...
Description of activity and work performed
Source Population: The training dataset used to develop our DSS has approximately 1.3 million diagnostic and 2.3 million imaging records from 340,525 patients over a ten-year period in four hospitals in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Data Processing: Our first data processing step was to extract features from each patient’s health (e.g., gender, ICD-10 diagnostic chapter codes) and imaging (e.g., modality and body part scanned) records over the ten-year study period. Next, we estimated the patient’s effective dose exposure [7] from medical imaging using mean values from...
Conclusion and recommendations
Deep learning is a promising tool for improved benefit-risk dialogue between health professionals and patients when considering an imaging scan. Further study is ongoing to validate our results by incorporating patient’s radiation exposure estimations from Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) files into our model.
Personal/organisational information
D. Koff; Hamilton, ON/CA - nothing to disclose O. Boursalie; Hamilton/CA - nothing to disclose R. Samavi; Hamilton/CA - nothing to disclose T. E. Doyle; Hamilton/CA - nothing to disclose
References
National Research Council. (2006) BEIR VII: Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Seong KM, Songwon S, Dalnim L, Min-Jeong K, Seung-Sook L, Sunhoo P, and Young WJ. (2016) Is the linear no-threshold dose-response paradigm still necessary for the assessment of health effects of low dose radiation? J Korean Med Sci.31(1): 10-23.
Pandharipande P, Eisenberg JD, Avery LL, Gunn ML, Kang SK, Medgibow A, Turan EA, Harvey HB, Kong CY, Dowling EC, Halpern EF, Donelan K,...