Prof. Dr. Elmar Kotter

Summary:

Traditionally, radiologists produce reports using a microphone and speech recognition while browsing through a very large number of images using a mouse. The result is a plain text report that is neither structured nor linked to the content of the images. Most radiologists agree that producing structured reports which are semantically linked to the images would have many advantages over traditional reporting. Systems to produce structured reports have been developed over the past 10-15 years, these systems are all build around graphical, mouse controlled interfaces. These systems are not well accepted by radiologists since they distract visual attention from the images to the reporting interface. Producing reports this way is more time consuming than using a microphone. So called report templates have been developed. These report templates describe the elements radiologists should describe in a given clinical setting (i.e. pancreatic carcinoma). It has been shown that the use of structured reporting using report templates results in more complete radiological reports. Producing structured reports would result in having the data stored in databases that could be used in many different ways. Structured report is easier to search, data elements can be used to trigger actions (actionable reports, i.e. presence of pulmonary embolism triggering further work-up), and the data elements could also be used as labels for the training of AI algorithms. On the other hand, report templates can be pre-populated by AI-algorithms before the reporting process by the radiologist is initiated. Also, since the report template constitutes a set of "questions" to be answered by the radiologist, it could support the extraction of data from the spoken word of radiologists. A combination of both could facilitate the production of radiology reports.