Preprocessing Prediction of Advanced Algorithms for Medical Imaging

Advanced medical imaging algorithms (such as bone removal, vessel segmentation, or a lung nodule detection) can provide extremely valuable information to the radiologists, but they might sometimes be very time consuming. Being able to run the algorithms in advance can be a possible solution. However, we do not know which algorithm to run on a given dataset before it is actually used. It is possible to manually insert matching rules for preprocessing algorithms, but it requires high maintenance and does not work well in practice. This paper presents a dynamic machine learning solution for predicting which advanced visualization (AV) algorithm needs to be applied on a given series. The system gets a handful of free text DICOM tags as an input and builds a model in the clinical setting. It incorporates a Bag of Words (BOW) feature extractor and a Random Forest classifier. The approach was tested on two datasets from clinical sites which use different languages and varying scanner models. We show that even without feature extraction, sensitivity of above 90% can be reached on both of them. By using BOW feature extractor, precision and sensitivity can usually be further improved. Even on a noisy and highly unbalanced dataset, only around 100 samples were needed to reach sensitivity of above 80% and specificity of above 97%. We show how the solution can be part of a Smart Preprocessing mechanism in a viewing software. Using such a system will ultimately minimize the time to launch studies and improve radiologists reading time efficiency.