November 9, 2020
The SZTE Department of Software Engineering and the MTA-SZTE Research Group on Artificial Intelligence have won a tender in a joint consortium with the Buda Health Center Ltd. (The National Center for Spinal Disorders) and the IFUA Horváth & Partners Ltd. titled “AUTORAD” – Research, development of an intelligent automatic spinal MR diagnostic and visualized reporting system and its integration into patient care process.
From Szeged’s side, the three-year tender will be implemented under the leadership of Dr. László Vidács, while the leader of the consortium is the Buda Health Center Ltd.
The project aims to create a marketable medical technology supported by artificial intelligence that can reform the diagnostic workflow in spine care and facilitate physician-patient communication, thereby improving the quality of patient care. As a main product, an artificial intelligence-based automated spinal MR interpreting algorithm and application will be developed, which, connecting to existing picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), will be able to automate the diagnostic reporting of spinal MR examinations, filtering out severe spinal diseases and pathologies that can be evaluated as potential sources of pain. One of the innovations of the project is that a significant part of the annotated data required for the development of the automatic MRI interpreting algorithm will be generated automatically by a dedicated text interpretation algorithm based on natural language processing.
As a result of the technological innovations implemented in the project, the diagnosis and screening of spinal diseases will become more efficient and the burden on radiologists will be reduced.