An artificially intelligent computer system was found to be able to tell the difference between healthy joints and joints with different forms of arthritis or rheumatism.
German doctors and AI experts performed the test. Their AI correctly diagnosed 82 percent of healthy joints, 75 percent of rheumatoid arthritis cases, and 68 percent of psoriatic arthritis cases.
Because the symptoms are not obvious in early stages, doctors, radiographers and other experts cannot compete with this computer.
This gives the millions of people at risk of rheumatism a little hope.
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Early treatment possible
To train their neural network to distinguish between healthy and diseased joints, the German researchers fed it, among other things, with high-resolution scans with spots drawn in.
Then the system learned the outward difference between rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis.
The artificial neurons were then allowed to show what they were worth by digging through 932 hand scans of 617 patients, who were healthy or had rheumatism.
After the training, the artificial intelligence independently classified the scans into healthy and diseased joints. There were scans of the common rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis, which affects 30 percent of patients with the skin disease psoriasis.
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Because the system picks up the risk signals much earlier than a doctor, treatments can hopefully be started earlier in the future.
If you don’t detect rheumatism early – for many people this is in the first weeks or months with pain and stiffness – the disease can take on a chronic form and there is no cure.
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Rheumatism is so bad
Doctors often have to rely on two-dimensional X-rays and the patient’s description, which do not always provide sufficient information.
Because rheumatism in the earliest phase resembles harmless muscle pain or overload, the disease is often missed.
Rheumatoid arthritis occurs when the immune system goes haywire and attacks healthy tissue.
Once the disease has spread to the joints, there’s nothing you can do about it, but medications and physiotherapy, among other things, can slow it down.
Commonly used drugs are chemotherapy such as tablet methotrexate or adrenal hormone injections.
Although rheumatic patients are often afraid of side effects, they do benefit from the drugs, because the disease itself is often much worse.
Within a few years, 90 percent of rheumatic patients have permanent joint injuries, and sometimes surgery is required.
According to the World Health Organization WHO, about 14 million people worldwide suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. Most of them are over 40, and a majority are women.
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Outcome for millions of people
It is estimated that 350 million people are living with some form of rheumatism, who can benefit greatly from an AI system at an early stage.
The German researchers say their technology for detecting rheumatism is at an early stage and can now only detect two of the hundreds of forms.
They do point out that their artificial intelligence can be used in the future to predict the chance that someone with, for example, psoriasis has rheumatism.
According to the researchers, expensive scans can be replaced by ultrasound. Hopefully within a few years a suspicion of incipient rheumatism can be confirmed or disproved with the help of AI.
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