I assume we agree upon the necessity of MRI examinations for a cost-effective and time-efficient Active Surveillance strategy. Do you think smarter technologies are also needed to enable active monitoring?
As everyone knows, the constant time pressure and the increasing number of examinations pose a major challenge in radiology. This challenge doesn't diminish when we aim to enable close monitoring of an ever-expanding group of patients. So yes, efficiency plays an important role, and AI is demonstrably a great support here. In my view, it's important that tools also assist in follow-up examinations by processing longitudinal data.
Regarding efficiency, many radiologists report that the use of contrast agents complicates the implementation of regular follow-up examinations. What is your stance on this debate?
Radiology is always evolving, and this is essential. In principle, I assume that in the future, the significance of DCE for all examinations will decrease, but it will still bring benefits for individual cases, such as very small lesions or inflammatory changes. Ideally, AI applications will enable targeted use of DCE in the future or render it obsolete in routine cases.
And you already mentioned the use of AI technologies, looking at future developments. Are the AI tools in the field of prostate examination already able to facilitate Active Surveillance?
Definitely, solutions like those from mediaire already offer benefits today through efficiency gains. Semi-automatic detections and classifications were an important first step. With mdprostate, mediaire has now introduced another pioneering innovation to the market. The tool supports fully automatic detection and classification according to PI-RADS 2.1. Generally, it can be observed that AI tools are developing very quickly and offering more and more advantages, far beyond efficiency.
Why do you see so much potential for the future in the development of a fully automatic solution like mdprostate?
I believe that these fully automatic solutions are crucial in the mid term to significantly relieve radiologists. This becomes tangible when considering that mdprostate will now also automate follow-up examinations. So I only need to correct results in exceptional cases. And in all other cases, I can focus directly on the interpretation, which can be quite complex in Active Surveillance. This way, we can use the technology to achieve a short-term improvement in the quality of diagnosis.
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