AB1161 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR RHEUMATOLOGY

Abstract

Background:Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of sacroiliac (SI) joints is used to detect early sacroiliitis(1). There can be an interobserver disagreement in MRI findings of SI joints of spondyloarthropathy patients between a rheumatologist, a local radiologist, and an expert radiologist(2). Artificial Intelligence and deep learning methods to detect abnormalities have become popular in radiology and other medical fields in recent years(3). Search for “artificial intelligence” and “radiology” in Pubmed for the last five years returned around 1500 clinical studies yet no results were retrieved for “artificial intelligence” and “rheumatology”.Objectives:Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help to detect the pathological area like sacroiliitis or not and also allows us to characterize it as quantitatively rather than qualitatively in the SI-MRI.Methods:Between the years of 2015 and 2019, 8100 sacroiliac MRIs were taken at our center. The MRIs of 1150 patients who were reported as active or chronic sacroiliitis from these sacroiliac MRIs or whose MRIs were considered by the primary physician in favor of sacroiliitis was included in the study. 1441 MRI coronal STIR sequence of 1150 patients were tagged as ‘’active sacroiliitis’’ and trained to detect and localize active sacroiliitis and provide prediction performance. This model is available for various operating systems. (Image1)Results:Precision score, the percentage of sacroiliac images of the trained model, is 87.1%. Recall, the percentage of the total sacroiliac MRIs correctly classified by the model, is 82.1% and the mean average precision (mAP) of the model is 89%.Conclusion:There are gray areas in medicine like sacroiliitis. Inter-observer variability can be reduced by AI and deep learning methods. The efficiency and reliability of health services can be increased in this way.