Current State of Community-Driven Radiological AI Deployment in Medical Imaging (Preprint)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become commonplace in solving routine everyday tasks. Because of the exponential growth in medical imaging data volume and complexity, the workload on radiologists is steadily increasing. AI has been shown to improve efficiency in medical image generation, processing, and interpretation, and various such AI models have been developed across research laboratories worldwide. However, very few of these, if any, find their way into routine clinical use, a discrepancy that reflects the divide between AI research and successful AI translation. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of the intersection of AI and medical imaging landscapes. We also want to inform the readers about the importance of using standards in their radiology workflow and the challenges associated with deploying AI models in the clinical workflow. The main focus of this paper is to examine the existing condition of radiology workflow and identify the challenges hindering the implementation of AI in hospital settings. This report reflects extensive weekly discussions and practical problem-solving expertise accumulated over multiple years by industry experts, imaging informatics professionals, research scientists, and clinicians. To gain a deeper understanding of the requirements for deploying AI models, we introduce a taxonomy of AI use cases, supplemented by real-world instances of AI model integration within hospitals. We will also explain how the need for AI integration in radiology can be addressed using the Medical Open Network for AI (MONAI). MONAI is an open-source consortium for providing reproducible deep learning solutions and integration tools for radiology practice in hospitals.