Can artificial intelligence help in the diagnosis of diseases and their treatments? The Department of Health of the Aragonese Government has opened a line of research with a pilot plan that analyzes emergency x-rays and alerts professionals if there may be pathology.
The project launched at the Obispo Polanco Hospital in Teruel refers to the use of artificial intelligence in these tests, one of the most common in Emergency services. Specifically, it is a pilot project to assist in the interpretation of simple radiology images of musculoskeletal and chest pathology using Artificial Intelligence. The program analyzes the images by an AI that indicates the probability of pathology in said images.
From the General Directorate of Digital Health and Infrastructure, within the digital transformation of the Aragonese Health Service that it heads, together with the company AZMED and with the Emergency, Radiology, Traumatology and IT services of the Obispo Polanco Hospital of Teruel, it is being carried out This project, which started on September 19 and lasts three months.
Highlights possible areas of pathology in less than a minute
The general director of Digital Health of the Aragonese Government, Joaquín Velilla, explains that the program analyzes the x-ray and provides a new image where possible pathologies are indicated. This image appears by default with an alert notifying that it has been generated by AI and that the doctor who cares for the patient is ultimately responsible for the report. The implemented system performs an initial triage of the x-rays, prioritizing those with anomalies, suggests the pathological areas in each image in less than a minute and is integrated into hospital systems with technical support and training.
The images that are generated are automatically sent to a virtual machine installed on the servers that return the image with the analysis already mentioned in a time between 1-2 minutes. The images that are generated are automatically sent to a virtual machine installed on the servers that return the image with the analysis already mentioned in a time between 1-2 minutes.
This is a pioneering project in public health in Aragon, which has required it to pass a series of very demanding requirements, both legal and quality. A group of physicians from the aforementioned Emergency, Radiology and Traumatology services have been selected to supervise the results of these analyzes and contribute their evaluation and proposals to the working group, and thus improve the results and analysis of the usefulness of the tool. , for its future more extensive implementation.
Another of the great values of this program is that it has a predictive value of up to 99% reliability in cases in which there is no pathology. This can be very useful in the field of Primary Care and in Emergency services to achieve faster diagnosis.
Performance and benefits
It is estimated that the system implies a saving of 36% in time in the interpretation of radiographs; improves diagnostic accuracy by 12% and has a negative predictive value of 99.6%.
The general director of Digital Health, Joaquín Velilla, has indicated that this system has already been implemented in more than 1,000 health centers in dozens of countries and is present in Spanish hospitals such as Vall d’Hebron and La Princesa University Hospital.
It is currently considered that AI can offer opportunities that improve medical care and increase efficiency in health systems. Artificial intelligence makes it possible to automate and streamline tasks using an amount of data whose scale exceeds what humans can analyze. With already created algorithms, it is capable of making predictions in less time and without variability due to external criteria.
In the Emergency Department of the Obispo Polanco Hospital in Teruel alone, 17,950 simple x-rays were performed last year solely of the characteristics and areas of diseases analyzed in this study. In the eight public hospitals of Aragon, this figure rose in 2023 to 258,722. Experts consider that in the face of such a high volume of activity, AI offers great support with the analysis of complex data.
The head of the Hospital’s Emergency Department, Fernando Galve, has highlighted that this project provides clinical security. In this sense, Jesús Ángel Martínez Burgui, president of the College of Physicians of Teruel and also an emergency doctor at the health center, has also expressed his satisfaction that Brother Bishop Polanco has been chosen to launch this pilot plan.
The general director of Digital Health visited the Obispo Polanco Hospital in Teruel this Monday to see first-hand how the program is working. The manager of the Teruel Sector, Pedro Eced, and the director of the Hospital, Ana Garzarán, have accompanied Velilla in the presentation of the pilot plan to the media, with the intervention of Jesús Ángel Martínez Burgui, in addition to the head of emergencies and responsible for other services involved, such as IT. The general director of Digital Health visited the Obispo Polanco Hospital in Teruel today to see first-hand how the program is working. The manager of the Teruel Sector, Pedro Eced, and the director of the Hospital, Ana Garzarán, have accompanied Velilla in the presentation of the pilot plan to the media, with the intervention of Jesús Ángel Martínez Burgui, in addition to the head of emergencies and responsible for other services involved, such as IT.