Nature Communications (Nov 2024)

Large-scale long-tailed disease diagnosis on radiology images

  • Qiaoyu Zheng,
  • Weike Zhao,
  • Chaoyi Wu,
  • Xiaoman Zhang,
  • Lisong Dai,
  • Hengyu Guan,
  • Yuehua Li,
  • Ya Zhang,
  • Yanfeng Wang,
  • Weidi Xie

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-54424-6
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15, no. 1
pp. 1 – 16

Abstract

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Abstract Developing a generalist radiology diagnosis system can greatly enhance clinical diagnostics. In this paper, we introduce RadDiag, a foundational model supporting 2D and 3D inputs across various modalities and anatomies, using a transformer-based fusion module for comprehensive disease diagnosis. Due to patient privacy concerns and the lack of large-scale radiology diagnosis datasets, we utilize high-quality, clinician-reviewed radiological images available online with diagnosis labels. Our dataset, RP3D-DiagDS, contains 40,936 cases with 195,010 scans covering 5568 disorders (930 unique ICD-10-CM codes). Experimentally, our RadDiag achieves 95.14% AUC on internal evaluation with the knowledge-enhancement strategy. Additionally, RadDiag can be zero-shot applied or fine-tuned to external diagnosis datasets sourced from various medical centers, demonstrating state-of-the-art results. In conclusion, we show that publicly shared medical data on the Internet is a tremendous and valuable resource that can potentially support building strong models for image understanding in healthcare.