American College of Radiology Launches ACR AI-LAB™ to Engage Radiologists in AI Model Development

The new American College of Radiology (ACR) Data Science Institute® (DSI) ACR AI-LAB, a groundbreaking free software platform, will empower local radiologists to participate in the creation, validation and use of health care artificial intelligence (AI).

The ACR DSI is committed to unlocking the potential of AI and helping radiology advance this technology throughout health care. As part of that strategy, ACR AI-LAB will provide radiologists with tools to develop AI algorithms at their own facilities, using their own data, to meet their own clinical needs. All of this will be done securely behind their own institutional firewalls. By combining ACR’s vast member network, its institutional connectivity to facilities and an industry community working to advance AI in healthcare, radiologists will be able to engage in all phases of the radiology AI development process.

ACR AI-LAB is an important step in an extraordinary ACR project that will help radiologists advance the use of AI throughout health care. ACR has been collaborating with industry, government and others throughout health care to promote a thriving AI ecosystem targeted towards patient and clinician needs. Standards, clinical pathways, education, and tools are all part of harnessing the potential of AI, and ACR AI-LAB is an important step in that journey.

ACR AI-LAB “democratizes” AI by allowing for the direct participation of radiology departments throughout the AI development life-cycle. Through a freely available, open, vendor-neutral framework, radiologists will be able to learn about AI, contribute AI datasets, share AI algorithms, evaluate AI models, develop AI models and even combine these models though transfer learning and model ensembles to address their local clinical needs. The ACR AI-LAB platform will also support any future FDA initiatives that use real world data for local adaptive learning for algorithm improvement and monitoring of continuously learning algorithms.

“By enabling radiologists to actively participate in all aspects of AI development, we can expect to see high impact healthcare solutions grow rapidly,” said Bibb Allen Jr., MD, FACR, ACR DSI Chief Medical Officer. “This new initiative fills existing gaps and permits direct participation throughout the AI development life-cycle.”

“Acquiring the necessary large amounts of patient data for algorithm training has been a huge problem for developers up to this point,” said Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, FACR, ACR DSI Chief Science Officer. “Consequently, AI has been slow to develop and has not spread widely to improve patient care. Enabling radiologists to develop AI on-premises, at their own institutions, will unlock massively larger data stores available for the development of AI. This will rapidly expand the AI solutions available to us all.”

The initial version of ACR AI-LAB will be shown at the 2019 ACR Annual Meeting in Washington, DC from May 18-22, 2019 and will demonstrate how radiologists can apply their clinical knowledge to generate and improve AI.

SOURCE American College of Radiology