Predicting Perceived Reporting Complexity of Abdominopelvic Computed Tomography With Deep Learning.

Objective: The purpose of this pilot study was to examine human and automated estimates of reporting complexity for computed tomography (CT) studies of the abdomen and pelvis.

Methods: A total of 1019 CT studies were reviewed and categorized into 3 complexity categories by 3 abdominal radiologists, and the majority classification was used as ground truth. Studies were randomized into a training set of 498 studies and a test set of 521 studies. A 2-stage neural network model was trained on the training set; the first-stage image-level classifier produces image embeddings that are used in the second-stage sequential model to provide a study-level prediction.

Results: All 3 human reviewers agreed on ratings for 470 of the 1019 studies (46%); at least 2 of the 3 reviewers agreed on ratings for 1010 studies (99%). After training, the neural network model predicted complexity labels that agreed with the radiologist consensus rating on 55% of the studies; 90% of the incorrect predicted categories were errors where the predicted category differed from the consensus rating by one level of complexity.

Conclusions: There is moderate interrater agreement in radiologist-perceived reporting complexity for CT studies of the abdomen and pelvis. Automated prediction of reporting complexity in radiology studies may be a useful adjunct to radiology practice analytics.