35 Computer Vision News Computer Vision News find some additional features or descriptors of the disease that aren’t there in the mainstream training of our physicians. Potentially, it can detect it earlier, and maybe, if trained correctly, it can detect more specific types of pneumonia.” The variance in severity across different patients is exactly why challenges like this are essential; all participants will work with the same set of cases and the range of difficulties they represent. “In the literature, if individual groups publish their own results, they typically have their own database of cases, and it’s really difficult to compare apples to apples because you’re not quite sure of the range and distributions and subtleties of the cases that individual groups use,” Sam points out. “Comparing performance across methods is not straightforward. That is exactly why we’re doing a challenge: to be able to level the playing field so all groups and all methods have the same cases.” Although this challenge focuses on chest X-rays, other imaging modalities, such as CT, have seen significant improvements in quality and diagnostic potential in recent years. Of course, any improvements in diagnosis rely on people putting themselves forward for or agreeing to imaging in the first place, as well as other considerations, such as health disparities and more complex social issues. “People can still wait till later, but that would be illadvised,” Karen adds. “Here in the United States, people tend to see the physician sooner, and treatment may be more aggressive than in other countries. I don’t know. It’s maybe a little bit of a cultural difference, too.” For teams considering participating in the challenge, Sam encourages a bold and collaborative approach while emphasizing its friendly and constructive nature. “The advice we would give to participants or people thinking about participating is to just go for it!” he says. “We’re looking for people to do their best and be as clever as possible in addressing the problem. The whole purpose of this is to try to move the field forward collectively. Every group that gets good results, or maybe not so good results, all of that is contributing to the knowledge of what is the best Chest x-Ray: identify and explain AI’s predictions
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