Radiological departments face challenges in efficiency and diagnostic consistency. The interpretation of radiographs remains highly variable between practitioners, which creates potential disparities in patient care. This study explores how artificial intelligence (AI), specifically transfer learning techniques, can automate parts of the radiological workflow to improve service quality and efficiency. Transfer learning methods were applied to various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and compared to classify medical images across different modalities, i.e., X-rays, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and angiography, through a two-component model: medical image modality prediction and anatomical region prediction. Several publicly available datasets were combined to create a representative dataset to evaluate residual networks (ResNet), dense networks (DenseNet), efficient networks (EfficientNet), and the Swin Transformer (Swin-T). The models were evaluated through accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics with macro-averaging to account for class imbalance. The results demonstrate that lightweight transfer learning methods effectively classify medical imagery, with an accuracy of 97.21% on test data for the combined transfer learning pipeline. EfficientNet-B4 demonstrated the best performance on both components of the proposed pipeline and achieved a 99.6% accuracy for modality prediction and 99.21% accuracy for anatomical region prediction on unseen test data. This approach offers the potential for streamlined radiological workflows while maintaining diagnostic quality. The strong model performance across diverse modalities and anatomical regions indicates robust generalisability for practical implementation in clinical settings.
Smidt et al. (Mon,) studied this question.