Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare | RadNet's Dr. Suzie Bash & Dr. Gregory Sorensen

All right, it is Wednesday which means the doctors are in and so is medical AI. Artificial intelligence in healthcare is not a new concept, but how exactly is it being used and why? And to answer some of our questions, we've invited two doctors who are pioneers in the field and have been speaking around the country and also the world. We're saying good afternoon to neuroradiologist Dr. Susie Bash and also Dr. Gregory Sorenson, chief science officer at Radnet. Good to see both of you.

Thank you so much for having us. So many people are interested in this topic.

First of all, Dr. Bash, let's talk about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing medicine or is it?

Yes. So AI is completely transforming healthcare and actually in a very positive way. So the currency of AI is actually data and so any areas of medicine that utilize a lot of data are being transformed first by AI. 76% of all AI healthcare patents are actually in radiology because it's the most data abundant subspecialty of medicine. So for example where I work at RADNET, the deep health AI division harnesses the power of AI to completely streamline the whole AI workflow. And what that does is it really increases accuracy and efficiency. It empowers access to care across a diverse patient population. It really enables sort of precision medicine which in the end translates to improved patient care, improved patient outcomes and also comfort. And just to give you a couple of practical examples of how we use it, we use AI to scan our patients 50 to 75% faster. So patients love it because 30% of patients have a severe anxiety reaction when they get an MRI. So for them, they're very happy to get in and out fast. But it doesn't just do that. It actually increases the image quality. So it makes us better doctors because then we might be able to, for example, catch a tumor at an earlier stage or something like that. And we also use it for example to find urgent or critical findings on imaging. So it can detect brain bleeds or aneurysms in the brain or abdominal aortic aneurysms, pulmonary embolism, cervical spine fracture and importantly things like stroke. And actually if you use AI to detect stroke, the patient gets treated much faster and that can actually translate to a 40% improved cognitive outcome not to mention shorter hospital stay. And then we also use it to evaluate the volumes of structures and the volumes of brain lesions for example. And so it can be very useful for MS or dementia or epilepsy. And then the one last point I wanted to mention is since computers are so good at pattern recognition, you can use AI which we do at Radnet for cancer screening. And Radnet doesn't just use it for prostate and lung screening but also for detecting breast cancers on mammography. And Dr. Sorenson here is actually a world expert in this. He brought this amazing technology to Radnet. It's very exciting.

Early cancer detection. How does that work with AI?

And is there a difference here, you're showing the difference between the AI and just a regular...

All right, Dr. Bash, we got to kind of move it forward here, but we also want to talk about Alzheimer's detection.

Yes. So, Alzheimer's is a very big issue. 6.7 million Americans have Alzheimer's and you can use AI tools that help a lot. A lot of people get memory loss when they get older and they want to know, is this something I should be worried about or is it normal aging? So, we can use AI to evaluate for brain volume loss. We can also use AI on PET scans when we do PET scans that are used to diagnose whether there is amyloid plaque in the brain which you see in Alzheimer's disease and AI tools can help in that regard as well. And then you can also use AI if you get some of the side effects that can go along with treatment. So AI can be very useful there. So it is playing a big role.

Great. All right, so should patients be worried about doctors relying too much on this?

No, I don't think so. I think AI will enable us to bring the best doctor in the world to every single patient. It distills all that knowledge and acts like a companion. So I would say you shouldn't be afraid of AI anymore than if a doctor brings in a colleague or a nurse to be alongside. It works alongside the physician, not instead of the physician.

And I think that answers this next question. Will it eventually replace you guys?

I don't really see that happening because...

You guys are...

Yeah, we're going to be here for a while. I think it will change the look of medicine. It will change how we operate as doctors. I don't anticipate because even though computers are better at pattern recognition, humans are better at global reasoning and so we work really synergistically with AI and again I think it really makes us better doctors. It really does.

Well thank you for explaining and sharing all the information about it. Appreciate it and as we joke all the time that also applies to news anchors. Fantastic. Thank you. All right. For more information you can log on to radnet.com.