A Checklist for Radiology Departments Seeking to Purchase AI
Marc Kohli, MD
A trio of imaging informatics experts looked at everything radiology departments need to consider before purchasing AI. Marc Kohli, MD, associate professor and associate chair of clinical informatics and John Mongan, MD, PhD, associate professor and associate chair for translational informatics in the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging were authors on this article along with Ross Filice, MD, chief of imaging informatics and body imaging at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. The article was recently published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
John Mongan, MD
As such, they went on to outline a stepwise process for evaluating AI tool purchases, beginning with performance evaluation. A few “take home” points include:
- AI implementations should address a well-defined problem in the radiology practice.
- Ease of use and workflow integration quality should be assessed before and after implementation.
- AI models should be monitored for patient safety, including unintended bias and especially the potential for reinforcing health care disparities.
- Impact on IT infrastructure and cost should be included in return-on-investment calculations.
In addition to their extensive guidelines, the team of experts put together an AI purchasing checklist, shown in the figure below.
Checklist of questions summarizing suggestions for creating a business case for purchasing AI. Source: Journal of the American College of Radiology.
“Purchasing AI systems requires close coordination with many stakeholder groups and consideration of system performance, validation, IT requirements, cost, as well as quality and safety,” the team concludes.
Drs. Mongan and Kohli are both part of the leadership of the UCSF Center for Intelligent Imaging (ci2), founded in 2019 to accelerate the application of AI to radiology, leveraging advanced computational techniques and industry collaborations to improve patient diagnoses and care.