Chennai: Radiologists at a city hospital demonstrated that artificial intelligence can slash radiation exposure in lung cancer screening by up to 80% while preserving diagnostic accuracy needed to catch tumours early.The study of 179 patients at MGM Malar Hospital in Adyar, presented at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna, found that scans enhanced with deep learning algorithms achieved 83.8% accuracy in detecting malignancies, compared with 88.8% for human radiologists and 87.2% for traditional machine learning classifiers. “Radiologist interpretation remains superior, but AI may serve as a valuable assistant,” said senior radiologist Dr Reefath J P Samuel.AI-enhanced scans delivered radiation doses of just eight to 10 milligray-centimetre — well below international standards and a fraction of those from conventional CT scans, which raise concerns about cancer risks from repeated exposure. A conventional chest CT delivers about 70 times more radiation than a chest X-ray. CT scans use X-ray radiation that can damage DNA. Most damage gets repaired, but mistakes in repair process can lead to cancer later. “Ultra-low-dose CT combined with AI-integrated thin-slice reconstruction demonstrates clinically useful diagnostic performance,” said study’s lead author Dr R J Prabagaran, head of radiology at MGM Malar Hospitals, whose team validated findings against tissue biopsies rather than relying solely on imaging interpretation.The technology uses DELTA reconstruction algorithms.
