Pediatric chest radiograph interpretation: how far has artificial intelligence come? A systematic literature review.

Journal: Pediatric radiology
Published Date:

Abstract

Most artificial intelligence (AI) studies have focused primarily on adult imaging, with less attention to the unique aspects of pediatric imaging. The objectives of this study were to (1) identify all publicly available pediatric datasets and determine their potential utility and limitations for pediatric AI studies and (2) systematically review the literature to assess the current state of AI in pediatric chest radiograph interpretation. We searched PubMed, Web of Science and Embase to retrieve all studies from 1990 to 2021 that assessed AI for pediatric chest radiograph interpretation and abstracted the datasets used to train and test AI algorithms, approaches and performance metrics. Of 29 publicly available chest radiograph datasets, 2 datasets included solely pediatric chest radiographs, and 7 datasets included pediatric and adult patients. We identified 55 articles that implemented an AI model to interpret pediatric chest radiographs or pediatric and adult chest radiographs. Classification of chest radiographs as pneumonia was the most common application of AI, evaluated in 65% of the studies. Although many studies report high diagnostic accuracy, most algorithms were not validated on external datasets. Most AI studies for pediatric chest radiograph interpretation have focused on a limited number of diseases, and progress is hindered by a lack of large-scale pediatric chest radiograph datasets.

Authors

  • Sirwa Padash
    Department of Medical Imaging, University of Saskatchewan, 103 Hospital Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 0W8, Canada. Sirwa.Padash@gmail.com.
  • Mohammad Reza Mohebbian
    Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of Saskatchewan Saskatoon SK S7N 5A9 Canada.
  • Scott J Adams
    College of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Electronic address: scott.adams@usask.ca.
  • Robert D E Henderson
    Department of Medical Imaging, Royal University Hospital, 7235University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.
  • Paul Babyn
    College of MedicineSaskatchewan Health Authority Saskatoon SK S7K 0M7 Canada.