At the end of a long week filled with too many deadlines and too little sleep, you wake up one morning woozy with a strange pain in your arm. You call your doctor, and she asks you a series of questions over the phone. She then tells you to go to the emergency room pronto: "I suspect you're having a heart attack." The doctor reached that conclusion not by simply making an educated guess, but by evaluating the data and using deductive reasoning. In medical school, physicians learn to estimate probabilities of disease based on symptoms, patient history, examination findings and labs or images.

An artificial intelligence (AI)-based software tool can make radiology clinical decision-support (CDS) software more user-friendly to ordering clinicians, according to research published October 1 in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Researchers from the University of Virginia Health System in Charlottesville shared their experience after incorporating a commercially available AI application for their radiology CDS software. This tool enables clinicians to enter the reason for their advanced imaging order via free text and then choose from a list of AI-predicted structured indications. The AI-based CDS software was not only used more often than the traditional process for ordering radiology exams, but it also significantly improved the rated appropriateness of their orders. "Our experience with an AI tool found it to successfully predict structured indications for ordering providers based upon their free-text entry, providing potential means to decrease the burden on ordering clinicians while ensuring [Protecting Access to Medicare Act] compliance," wrote the authors led by first author Dr. David Gish.