Quebec physician wins RSNA’s AI competition

CHICAGO – A competition to foster AI expertise in diagnostic imaging, sponsored by the RSNA, was won by a Canadian radiologist working in partnership with a U.S. medical student. In November, Dr. Alexandre Cadrin-Chênevert (pictured), a practicing radiologist in Lanaudière, Quebec, and Ian Pan, a third-year med student at Brown University, took first place in the RSNA’s Pneumonia Detection Challenge.

Over 1,400 teams developed algorithms to identify and localize pneumonia in chest X-rays and 346 submitted results during the evaluation phase of the competition.

It was the RSNA’s second annual Machine Learning Challenge, and it made use of a publicly available chest X-ray dataset from the National Institutes of Health. The data were annotated to provide the “ground truth” for participants to train their algorithms and to evaluate their submissions in the final phase of the challenge.

The challenge was run on a platform provided by Kaggle, Inc. (a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc., also the parent company of Google). Kaggle also provided $30,000 in prize money to be shared among the winning entries.

For their part, Dr. Cadrin-Chênevert and Pan shared $12,000 in first-place prize money.

Of note, another Canadian radiologist Dr. Alex Bilbily won the challenge in 2017.