Developing Deep Learning Analytics for Health Care

The University of California, San Francisco is developing and training an artificial intelligence model that could help clinicians diagnose tears in knee cartilage. As many athletes and active people have learned, a tear in the knee cartilage, or the meniscus, can lead to long-term health and lifestyle consequences, from debilitating osteoarthritis to limits on physical activity. One of the keys to mitigating these consequences is to identify and treat tears in the meniscus early on, before the condition brings larger health issues. While this goal is pretty simple, the path forward is rather complicated. To diagnose a torn meniscus, clinicians need to review and interpret hundreds of high-resolution 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) slices showing a patient's knee from different angles.