A Foundation Model for Next-Generation Generalizable AI in Neuro-Radiology

Medical artificial intelligence (AI) holds immense promise for transforming radiology by introducing advanced diagnostic capabilities. Yet, traditional AI models face challenges like extensive data annotation needs and are task-specific with limited generalizability to different scenarios. This problem of robust and label-efficient generalization continues to be a key translational challenge for medical AI models and has prevented their broad uptake in real world healthcare settings. AI-Next will build on the recent advent of foundation models, providing a unique opportunity to rethink the development of medical AI and overcome the challenges of traditional AI models. At the core of AI-Next stands the development of a state-of-the-art visual foundation model (VFM) that learns generalizable representations from unlabelled radiology scans and provides a basis for label-efficient model adaptation in several applications. The VFM will focus on neuro-radiology and be trained with data at unprecedented scale including >200,000 brain computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging scans from population-based and disease specific cohorts, leveraging self-supervised learning. The VFM will be adapted with a limited set of explicit labels to a range of tasks with clinical significance. This includes the screening and triage of scans for emergency findings, longitudinal disease activity assessment, risk prediction of dementia, forecasting of disease evolution and finally automated radiology reporting. Moreover, the VFM will be employed for image processing tasks, including generating super-resolution images to enhance diagnostic capabilities. Overall, AI-Next will represent a crucial step towards more generalisable, accurate and label-efficient AI in neuro-radiology, offering significant potential for improving diagnostics, clinical decision-making as well as patient outcomes, and its open-source innovations will serve as a blueprint for the broader field of radiology.