A CT Algorithm Can Elevate the Differential Diagnosis of Interstitial Lung Disease by Non-specialists to Equal That of Specialist Thoracic Radiologists.

Background: Diagnosis of diffuse parenchymal lung diseases (DPLD) on high resolution CT (HRCT) is difficult for non-expert radiologists due to varied presentation for any single disease and overlap in presentation between diseases.

Rationale And Objectives: To evaluate whether a pattern-based training algorithm can improve the ability of non-experts to diagnosis of DPLD.

Materials And Methods: Five experts (cardiothoracic-trained radiologists), and 25 non-experts (non-cardiothoracic-trained radiologists, radiology residents, and pulmonologists) were each assigned a semi-random subset of cases from a compiled database of DPLD HRCTs.