Algorithm better at diagnosing pneumonia than radiologists

Stanford researchers have developed a deep-learning algorithm that evaluates chest X-rays for signs of disease. Stanford researchers have developed an algorithm that offers diagnoses based off chest X-ray images. A paper about the algorithm, called CheXNet, was published Nov. 14 on the open-access, scientific preprint website arXiv. "Interpreting X-ray images to diagnose pathologies like pneumonia is very challenging, and we know that there's a lot of variability in the diagnoses radiologists arrive at," said Pranav Rajpurkar, a graduate student in the Machine Learning Group at Stanford and co-lead author of the paper. "We became interested in developing machine learning algorithms that could learn from hundreds of thousands of chest X-ray diagnoses and make accurate diagnoses."