Abstract Medicare, a major healthcare program under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has extended telemedicine services within several states in the US for different specialties for which it reimburses in order to establish a qualitative and accessible healthcare system. In parallel, it has been seen that teleradiology services by American Board Certified radiologists based offshore can significantly supplement healthcare delivery in the US by mitigating the shortage of radiologists and enhance outcomes of patient care especially for after-hours emergency work. Teleradiology can help workflow by improving workload distribution, lowering the cost of reporting, shortening turn-around-time for reports, and improving quality of life for staff. The aim of the article is to provide perspective on Medicare reimbursement of offshore telereporting services. We submit that due to its value proposition and contribution to healthcare, offshore telereporting by American Board Certified Radiologists is worthy of Medicare reimbursement and should be re-evaluated for its credits.

Abstract Breast cancer was a prevalent form of cancer worldwide. Thermography, a method for diagnosing breast cancer, involves recording the thermal patterns of the breast. This article explores the use of a convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm to extract features from a dataset of thermographic images. Initially, the CNN network was used to extract a feature vector from the images. Subsequently, machine learning techniques can be used for image classification. This study utilizes four classification methods, namely Fully connected neural network (FCnet), support vector machine (SVM), classification linear model (CLINEAR), and KNN, to classify breast cancer from thermographic images. The accuracy rates achieved by the FCnet, SVM, CLINEAR, and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithms were 94.2%, 95.0%, 95.0%, and 94.1%, respectively. Furthermore, the reliability parameters for these classifiers were computed as 92.1%, 97.5%, 96.5%, and 91.2%, while their respective sensitivities were calculated as 95.5%, 94.1%, 90.4%, and 93.2%. These findings can assist experts in developing an expert system for breast cancer diagnosis.

Abstract The cost of diagnostic errors has been high in the developed world economics according to a number of recent studies and continues to rise. Up till now, a common process of performing image diagnostics for a growing number of conditions has been examination by a single human specialist (i.e., single-channel recognition and classification decision system). Such a system has natural limitations of unmitigated error that can be detected only much later in the treatment cycle, as well as resource intensity and poor ability to scale to the rising demand. At the same time Machine Intelligence (ML, AI) systems, specifically those including deep neural network and large visual domain models have made significant progress in the field of general image recognition, in many instances achieving the level of an average human and in a growing number of cases, a human specialist in the effectiveness of image recognition tasks. The objectives of the AI in Medicine (AIM) program were set to leverage the opportunities and advantages of the rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence technology to achieve real and measurable gains in public healthcare, in quality, access, public confidence and cost efficiency. The proposal for a collaborative AI-human image diagnostics system falls directly into the scope of this program.

Abstract In view of the fact that the convolution neural network segmentation method lacks to capture the global dependency of infected areas in COVID-19 images, which is not conducive to the complete segmentation of scattered lesion areas, this paper proposes a COVID-19 lesion segmentation method UniUNet based on UniFormer with its strong ability to capture global dependency. Firstly, a U-shaped encoder-decoder structure based on UniFormer is designed, which can enhance the cooperation ability of local and global relations. Secondly, Swin spatial pyramid pooling module is introduced to compensate the influence of spatial resolution reduction in the encoder process and generate multi-scale representation. Multi-scale attention gate is introduced at the skip connection to suppress redundant features and enhance important features. Experiment results show that, compared with the other four methods, the proposed model achieves better results in Dice, loU and Recall on COVID-19-CT-Seg and CC-CCIII dataset, and achieves a more complete segmentation of the lesion area.

Abstract Objective: To investigate the value of differential diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and cirrhotic nodules via radiomics models based on magnetic resonance images. Background: This study is to distinguish hepatocellular carcinoma and cirrhotic nodules using MR-radiomics features extracted from four different phases of MRI images, concluded T1WI, T2WI, T2 SPIR and delay phase of contrast MRI. Methods: In this study, the four kind of magnetic resonance images of 23 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) were collected. Among them, 12 patients with liver cirrhosis were used to obtain cirrhotic nodules (CN). The dataset was used to extract MR-radiomics features from regions of interest (ROI). The statistical methods of MRradiomics features could distinguish HCC and CN. And the ability of radiomics features between HCC and CN was estimated by receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC). Results: A total of 424 radiomics features were extracted from four kind of magnetic resonance images. 86 features in delay phase of contrast MRI，86 features in spir phase of T2WI，86 features in T1WI and 88 features in T2WI showed statistical difference ( p < 0.05). Among them, the area under the curves (AUC) of these features larger than 0.85 were 58 features in delay phase of contrast MRI, 54 features in spir phase of T2WI, 62 features in T1WI and 57 features in T2WI. Conclusions: Radiomics features extracted from MRI images have the potential to distinguish HCC and CN.

Abstract Inflammation of the lungs, called pneumonia, is a disease characterized by inflammation of the air sacs that interfere with the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. It is caused by a variety of infectious organisms, including viruses, bacteria, fungus, and parasites. Pneumonia is more common in people who have pre-existing lung diseases or compromised immune systems, and it primarily affects small children and the elderly. Diagnosis of pneumonia can be difficult, especially when relying on medical imaging, because symptoms may not be immediately apparent. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently shown potential in medical imaging applications. A CNN-based deep learning model is being built as part of ongoing research to aid in the detection of pneumonia using chest X-ray images. The dataset used for training and evaluation includes images of people with normal lung conditions as well as photos of people with pneumonia. Various preprocessing procedures, such as data augmentation, normalization, and scaling, were used to improve the accuracy of pneumonia diagnosis and extract significant features. In this study, a framework for deep learning with four pre-trained CNN models—InceptionNet, ResNet, VGG16, and DenseNet—was used. To take use of its key advantages, transfer learning utilizing DenseNet was used. During training, the loss function was minimized using the Adam optimizer. The suggested approach seeks to improve early diagnosis and enable fast intervention for pneumonia cases by leveraging the advantages of several CNN models. The outcomes show that CNN-based deep learning models may successfully diagnose pneumonia in chest X-ray pictures.