Imaging workflow has been immensely impacted by Artificial Intelligence: Dr Raj Janardhan

Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld spoke to Prof. Dr.Raj Janardhan, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA and director of noninvasive imaging to know about how Echocardiography has evolved after the arrival of artificial intelligence.

How has AI impacted your work in cardiology ?
I've been there in practice for almost 10 years in my current job. I do primarily Echocardiography, including C.T., an MRI and nuclear cardiology. The latest revolution that has happened is in artificial intelligence. This is especially involved and affected our imaging workflow. There are several situations where artificial intelligence has actually transformed our practice.

This has been in automation of the left ventricle and the right ventricle. The aspects that we routinely use in our practice. Now we are also looking into the atrial side. So artificial intelligence has made possible to look into large data sets and coming with normals and then detecting abnormality in a very easy and efficient manner.

Again, artificial intelligence has actually affected routine day-to-day work. To give you an example, we spend a lot of time in the calculation of LV function for the morality by ejection fraction on echocardiography but now artificial intelligence have automated ways of getting these measures in a quick press of a button. It has actually eased our workload. We have become more efficient in the last few weeks, months with the arrival of artificial intelligence, which has been implemented on the machines itself.

This is not the future. We are not talking about the person but the technology which has actually made our lives better and also affected patient care.


How do yo see the future of AI?
Talking about the future again, ours is going to pave the way. I am already worried if it is going to replace the human brain. That's a concern. But actually it's a good concern because it essentially is going to ease our workload and this will allow us to see a large amount of patients in a short amount of time. But at the same time

providing quality care. So I would believe that moving forward is going to be a win-win for the practice of medicine.