The radiology technology trends Dhruv Chopra flagged for 2020

Writing in Imaging Technology News in 2020, Dhruv Chopra, then CEO of Collaborative Imaging (now CIVIE), set out the technology trends he expected to matter most to radiologists in the new decade. His premise was that the right tools help radiologists deliver better service faster and guard against burnout, but only if practices learn what’s available and choose deliberately.

Hyperautomation

Chopra described hyperautomation as using machine learning, AI and related tools to automate work that previously needed people. One example he gave was patient communication: automated, secure text messages about appointments and when scan results are ready. He stressed that no single tool replaces a person, so success depends on combining tools such as robotic process automation, business process software and AI.

AI and machine learning

He grouped AI’s impact into three areas:

• Diagnostics. Tools trained to read scans can speed up diagnosis and help prioritize cases or secondary reads.
• Continuous training. Feedback loops let a radiologist who learns a pathology or surgical outcome pull up similar past cases and learn from them.
• Security. Citing rising healthcare breaches and a Black Book Market Research survey in which 96 percent of IT professionals agreed attackers were outpacing medical enterprises, he argued practices need AI-aware security that protects training data, models and pipelines.

Automatic reallocation

Chopra expected AI-assisted workflow systems to plan exams, balance workload against reading capacity, assign studies by radiologist availability, location and subspecialty, send selected exams to AI first, and manage SLA deadlines. Later, he wrote, such systems could spot bottlenecks, reroute exams and forecast demand from EMR data. Adopting workflow orchestration early, in his view, gives radiologists a head start on productivity.

Cross-discipline collaboration

His final trend was radiology leading integrated diagnostics. Because radiology is one of the most IT-literate specialties, and pathology is moving to digital images, he expected more structured collaboration between the two.

Several of these ideas, from automated worklist routing to AI inside the reading workflow, became part of the CIVIE platform.

Source: “Radiology Technology Trends to Watch in 2020,” Dhruv Chopra, Imaging Technology News, January 31, 2020.