Curtis P Langlotz

• MD, PhD
• Professor at Stanford University

With the rise of generative AI, there is a growing need for automatic metrics to evaluate the factual accuracy of clinical text, yet no such tool exists for echocardiography. Existing evaluation tools often underperform in this domain. To address this, we developed EchoGraph, a BERT-based model trained on densely annotated echocardiography reports...

This dataset, Collab-CXR, provides a unique resource to study human-AI collaboration in chest X-ray interpretation. We present experimentally generated data from 227 professional radiologists who assessed 324 historical cases under varying information conditions: with and without AI assistance, and with and without clinical history. Using a custom-...

Large foundation models show promise in biomedicine but face challenges in clinical use due to performance gaps, accessibility, cost, and lack of scalable evaluation. Here we show that open-source small multimodal models can bridge these gaps in radiology by generating free-text findings from chest X-ray images. Our data-centric approach leverages...

This article provides radiologists with a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of large language models and how to best use these models in clinical practice, including practical guidance on limitations, effective prompting, and fine-tuning strategies.

Aims The increasing need for diagnostic echocardiography tests presents challenges in preserving the quality and promptness of reports. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective in summarizing clinical texts, their application in echo remains underexplored. Methods and results Adult echocardiography studies, conducted at the Mayo Cl...

Medical images are acquired at high resolutions with large fields of view in order to capture fine-grained features necessary for clinical decision-making. Consequently, training deep learning models on medical images can incur large computational costs. In this work, we address the challenge of downsizing medical images in order to improve downstr...

Despite major advances in artificial intelligence (AI) research for healthcare, the deployment and adoption of AI technologies remain limited in clinical practice. This paper describes the FUTURE-AI framework, which provides guidance for the development and deployment of trustworthy AI tools in healthcare. The FUTURE-AI Consortium was founded in 20...

At the heart of radiological practice is the challenge of integrating complex imaging data with clinical information to produce actionable insights. Nuanced application of language is key for various activities, including managing requests, describing and interpreting imaging findings in the context of clinical data, and concisely documenting and c...

Purpose: To explore best-practice approaches for generating synthetic chest X-ray images and augmenting medical imaging datasets to optimize the performance of deep learning models in downstream tasks like classification and segmentation. Materials and Methods: We utilized a latent diffusion model to condition the generation of synthetic chest X-ra...

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have witnessed the emergence of large-scale deep learning models capable of interpreting and generating both textual and imaging data. Such models, typically referred to as foundation models, are trained on extensive corpora of unlabeled data and demonstrate high performance across various tasks. Foundatio...

With the rise of medical foundation models and the growing availability of imaging data, scalable pretraining techniques offer a promising way to identify imaging biomarkers predictive of future disease risk. While current self-supervised methods for 3D medical imaging models capture local structural features like organ morphology, they fail to lin...

Fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) often capture spurious correlations between image features and textual attributes, resulting in degraded zero-shot performance at test time. Existing approaches for addressing spurious correlations (i) primarily operate at the global image-level rather than intervening directly on fine-grained image features...

Radiologists play a crucial role by translating medical images into medical reports. However, the field faces staffing shortages and increasing workloads. While automated approaches using vision-language models (VLMs) show promise as assistants, they require exceptionally high accuracy. Most current VLMs in radiology rely solely on supervised fine-...

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are driving innovation in biosciences and are already affecting key elements of medical scholarship and clinical care. Many schools of medicine are capitalizing on the promise of these new technologies by establishing academic units to catalyze and grow research and innovation in AI/ML. At Stan...

Recent developments in natural language generation have tremendous implications for healthcare. For instance, state-of-the-art systems could automate the generation of sections in clinical reports to alleviate physician workload and streamline hospital documentation. To explore these applications, we present a shared task consisting of two subtasks...

The paucity of high-quality medical imaging datasets could be mitigated by machine learning models that generate compositionally diverse images that faithfully represent medical concepts and pathologies. However, large vision–language models are trained on natural images, and the diversity distribution of the generated images substantially differs...

While Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) for natural language performs well and has become widely adopted, its adoption for other modalities has been slower. Here, we introduce Lie group Relative position Encodings (LieRE) that goes beyond RoPE in supporting higher dimensional inputs. We evaluate the performance of LieRE on 2D and 3D image classific...

Over 85 million computed tomography (CT) scans are performed annually in the US, of which approximately one quarter focus on the abdomen. Given the current radiologist shortage, there is a large impetus to use artificial intelligence to alleviate the burden of interpreting these complex imaging studies. Prior state-of-the-art approaches for automat...

To address the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence in medical imaging, the authors present the Checklist for Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging (CLAIM) 2024 Update.

Since the release of the original CheXpert paper five years ago, CheXpert has become one of the most widely used and cited clinical AI datasets. The emergence of vision language models has sparked an increase in demands for sharing reports linked to CheXpert images, along with a growing interest among AI fairness researchers in obtaining demographi...

Analyzing vast textual data and summarizing key information from electronic health records imposes a substantial burden on how clinicians allocate their time. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their effectiveness on a diverse range of clinical summarization tasks remains unproven. H...

Background The increasing need for diagnostic echocardiography (echo) tests presents challenges in preserving the quality and promptness of reports. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective in summarizing clinical texts, their application in echo remains underexplored. To address this, we proposed EchoGPT, a dedicated, domain-specif...

Synthesizing information from various data sources plays a crucial role in the practice of modern medicine. Current applications of artificial intelligence in medicine often focus on single-modality data due to a lack of publicly available, multimodal medical datasets. To address this limitation, we introduce INSPECT, which contains de-identified l...

Importance Limited sharing of data sets that accurately represent disease and patient diversity limits the generalizability of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in health care. Objective To explore the factors associated with organizational motivation to share health data for AI development. Design, Setting, and Participants This qualitativ...

Introduction: Our goal was to create a generalizable Cardiac MRI (CMR) deep learning system capable of understanding the breadth of human disease and health. With traditional supervised approaches, parameters learned for one clinical problem rarely generalize to others. Models must be re-trained from scratch for each new clinical task of interest,...

Sifting through vast textual data and summarizing key information from electronic health records (EHR) imposes a substantial burden on how clinicians allocate their time. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown immense promise in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their efficacy on a diverse range of clinical summarization tasks has...

Objectives There is a need for CT pulmonary angiography (CTPA) lung segmentation models. Clinical translation requires radiological evaluation of model outputs, understanding of limitations, and identification of failure points. This multicentre study aims to develop an accurate CTPA lung segmentation model, with evaluation of outputs in two divers...

Importance A recently developed vision foundation model, "Segment Anything (SAM)," promises to segment any objects in images. However, the performance of SAM on clinical echocardiography images is yet to be investigated and compared against the domain-specific models. Objective To evaluate the performance of SAM on transthoracic echocardiography (T...

Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP and ALIGN, are generally trained on datasets consisting of image-caption pairs obtained from the web. However, real-world multimodal datasets, such as healthcare data, are significantly more complex: each image (e.g. X-ray) is often paired with text (e.g. physician report) that describes many distinct att...

Objective To describe the infrastructure, tools, and services developed at Stanford Medicine to maintain its data science ecosystem and research patient data repository for clinical and translational research. Materials and Methods The data science ecosystem, dubbed the Stanford Data Science Resources (SDSR), includes infrastructure and tools to c...

The bigger picture Artificial intelligence (AI) has made formidable progress in the interpretation of medical images, but its application has largely been limited to the identification of a handful of individual pathologies. In contrast, the generation of complete narrative radiology reports more closely matches how radiologists communicate diagnos...

Interstitial lung diseases (ILD) present diagnostic challenges due to their varied manifestations and overlapping imaging features. To address this, we propose a machine learning approach that utilizes CLIP, a multimodal (image and text) self-supervised model, for ILD classification. We extensively integrate zero-shot CLIP throughout our workflow,...

We systematically investigate lightweight strategies to adapt large language models (LLMs) for the task of radiology report summarization (RRS). Specifically, we focus on domain adaptation via pretraining (on natural language, biomedical text, and clinical text) and via prompting (zero-shot, in-context learning) or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (...

Large-language models have recently demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in a variety of natural language tasks such as summarization, dialogue generation, and question-answering. Despite many promising applications in clinical medicine, adoption of these models in real-world settings has been largely limited by their tendency to generate...

Objective To develop an automated deidentification pipeline for radiology reports that detect protected health information (PHI) entities and replaces them with realistic surrogates “hiding in plain sight.” Materials and Methods In this retrospective study, 999 chest X-ray and CT reports collected between November 2019 and November 2020 were annot...

Multimodal models trained on large natural image-text pair datasets have exhibited astounding abilities in generating high-quality images. Medical imaging data is fundamentally different to natural images, and the language used to succinctly capture relevant details in medical data uses a different, narrow but semantically rich, domain-specific voc...

Radiology report summarization is a growing area of research. Given the Findings and/or Background sections of a radiology report, the goal is to generate a summary (called an Impression section) that highlights the key observations and conclusions of the radiology study. Recent efforts have released systems that achieve promising performance as me...

Building a document-level classifier for COVID-19 on radiology reports could help assist providers in their daily clinical routine, as well as create large numbers of labels for computer vision models. We have developed such a classifier by fine-tuning a BERT-like model initialized from RadBERT, its continuous pre-training on radiology reports that...

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision hold great promise for assisting medical staff, optimizing healthcare workflow, and improving patient outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic, which caused unprecedented stress on healthcare systems around the world, presented what seems to be a perfect opportunity for AI to demonstrate its usefu...

Neural image-to-text radiology report generation systems offer the potential to improve radiology reporting by reducing the repetitive process of report drafting and identifying possible medical errors. These systems have achieved promising performance as measured by widely used NLG metrics such as BLEU and CIDEr. However, the current systems face...

Multi-modal foundation models are typically trained on millions of pairs of natural images and text captions, frequently obtained through web-crawling approaches. Although such models depict excellent generative capabilities, they do not typically generalize well to specific domains such as medical images that have fundamentally shifted distributio...

In tasks involving the interpretation of medical images, suitably trained machine-learning models often exceed the performance of medical experts. Yet such a high-level of performance typically requires that the models be trained with relevant datasets that have been painstakingly annotated by experts. Here we show that a self-supervised model trai...

The application of AI to medical image interpretation tasks has largely been limited to the identification of a handful of individual pathologies. In contrast, the generation of complete narrative radiology reports more closely matches how radiologists communicate diagnostic information in clinical workflows. Recent progress in artificial intellige...

As the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical practice evolves, governance structures oversee the implementation, maintenance, and monitoring of clinical AI algorithms to enhance quality, manage resources, and ensure patient safety. In this article, a framework is established for the infrastructure required for clinical AI implementation...

The fact that medical images are still predominately exchanged between institutions via physical media is unacceptable in the era of value-driven health care. Although better solutions are technically possible, problems of coordination and market dynamics may be inhibiting progress more than technical factors. We provide a macrosystem analysis of t...

The National Institutes of Health in 2018 identified key focus areas for the future of artificial intelligence in medical imaging, creating a foundational roadmap for research in image acquisition, algorithms, data standardization and translatable clinical decision support systems. Among the key issues raised in the report, data availability, the n...

Background Previous studies suggest that use of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms as diagnostic aids may improve the quality of skeletal age assessment, though these studies lack evidence from clinical practice. Purpose To compare the accuracy and interpretation time of skeletal age assessment on hand radiograph examinations with and without...

Despite progressive improvements over the decades, the rich temporally resolved data in an echocardiogram remain underutilized. Human assessments reduce the complex patterns of cardiac wall motion, to a small list of measurements of heart function. All modern echocardiography artificial intelligence (AI) systems are similarly limited by design – au...

Extracting structured clinical information from free-text radiology reports can enable the use of radiology report information for a variety of critical healthcare applications. In our work, we present RadGraph, a dataset of entities and relations in full-text chest X-ray radiology reports based on a novel information extraction schema we designed...

Objective The study sought to develop and evaluate neural natural language processing (NLP) packages for the syntactic analysis and named entity recognition of biomedical and clinical English text. Materials and Methods We implement and train biomedical and clinical English NLP pipelines by extending the widely used Stanza library originally desig...

Abstract Coronary artery disease (CAD), the most common manifestation of cardiovascular disease, remains the most common cause of mortality in the United States. Risk assessment is key for primary prevention of coronary events and coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring using computed tomography (CT) is one such non-invasive tool. Despite the proven...

Background Multicenter data on long term survival following LVAD implantation that make use of contemporary definitions of RV failure are limited. Furthermore, traditional survival analyses censor patients who receive a bridge to heart transplant. Here we compare the outcomes of LVAD patients who develop post-operative RV failure accounting for the...

Integrating methods for time-to-event prediction with diagnostic imaging modalities is of considerable interest, as accurate estimates of survival requires accounting for censoring of individuals within the observation period. New methods for time-to-event prediction have been developed by extending the cox-proportional hazards model with neural ne...

Advances in computing power, deep learning architectures, and expert labelled datasets have spurred the development of medical imaging artificial intelligence systems that rival clinical experts in a variety of scenarios. The National Institutes of Health in 2018 identified key focus areas for the future of artificial intelligence in medical imagin...

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms continue to rival human performance on a variety of clinical tasks, while their actual impact on human diagnosticians, when incorporated into clinical workflows, remains relatively unexplored. In this study, we developed a deep learning-based assistant to help pathologists differentiate between two subtypes o...

Introduction: Post-operative right ventricular failure (RV failure) is the single largest contributor to short-term mortality in patients with left ventricular assist devices (LVAD); yet predicting which patient is at risk of developing this complication in the pre-operative setting has remained beyond the abilities of experts in the field. We hypo...

Neural image-to-text radiology report generation systems offer the potential to accelerate clinical processes by saving radiologists from the repetitive labor of drafting radiology reports and preventing medical errors. However, existing report generation systems, despite achieving high performances on natural language generation metrics such as CI...

Learning visual representations of medical images is core to medical image understanding but its progress has been held back by the small size of hand-labeled datasets. Existing work commonly relies on transferring weights from ImageNet pretraining, which is suboptimal due to drastically different image characteristics, or rule-based label extracti...

Although artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms for diagnosis hold promise for improving care, their safety and effectiveness must be ensured to facilitate wide adoption. Several recently proposed regulatory frameworks provide a solid foundation but do not address a number of issues that may prevent algorithms from being fully trusted. In th...

Purpose: To develop and evaluate the accuracy of a multi-view deep learning approach to the analysis of high-resolution synthetic mammograms from digital breast tomosynthesis screening cases, and to assess the effect on accuracy of image resolution and training set size. Materials and Methods: In a retrospective study, 21,264 screening digital brea...

Artificial intelligence algorithms based on principles of deep learning (DL) have made a large impact on the acquisition, reconstruction, and interpretation of MRI data. Despite the large number of retrospective studies using DL, there are fewer applications of DL in the clinic on a routine basis. To address this large translational gap, we review...

We introduce biomedical and clinical English model packages for the Stanza Python NLP library. These packages offer accurate syntactic analysis and named entity recognition capabilities for biomedical and clinical text, by combining Stanza's fully neural architecture with a wide variety of open datasets as well as large-scale unsupervised biomedica...

Accurate assessment of cardiac function is crucial for the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease¹, screening for cardiotoxicity² and decisions regarding the clinical management of patients with a critical illness³. However, human assessment of cardiac function focuses on a limited sampling of cardiac cycles and has considerable inter-observer variabi...

In this article, the authors propose an ethical framework for using and sharing clinical data for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The philosophical premise is as follows: when clinical data are used to provide care, the primary purpose for acquiring the data is fulfilled. At that point, clinical data should be treated...

The development of deep learning algorithms for complex tasks in digital medicine has relied on the availability of large labeled training datasets, usually containing hundreds of thousands of examples. The purpose of this study was to develop a 3D deep learning model, AppendiXNet, to detect appendicitis, one of the most common life-threatening abd...

While artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms continue to rival human performance on a variety of clinical tasks, the question of how best to incorporate these algorithms into clinical workflows remains relatively unexplored. We investigated how AI can affect pathologist performance on the task of differentiating between two subtypes of primary liv...

ive summarization models are able to generate summaries which have high overlap with human references. However, existing models are not optimized for factual correctness, a critical metric in real-world applications. In this work, we propose to evaluate the factual correctness of a generated summary by fact-checking it against its reference using a...

Different convolutional neural network (CNN) models have been tested for their application in histologic imaging analyses. However, these models are prone to overfitting due to their large parameter capacity, requiring more data and expensive computational resources for model training. Given these limitations, we developed and tested PlexusNet for...

Large, labeled datasets have driven deep learning methods to achieve expert-level performance on a variety of medical imaging tasks. We present CheXpert, a large dataset that contains 224,316 chest radiographs of 65,240 patients. We design a labeler to automatically detect the presence of 14 observations in radiology reports, capturing uncertaintie...

Advances in machine learning in medical imaging are occurring at a rapid pace in research laboratories both at academic institutions and in industry. Important artificial intelligence (AI) tools for diagnostic imaging include algorithms for disease detection and classification, image optimization, radiation reduction, and workflow enhancement. Alth...

Imaging research laboratories are rapidly creating machine learning systems that achieve expert human performance using open-source methods and tools. These artificial intelligence systems are being developed to improve medical image reconstruction, noise reduction, quality assurance, triage, segmentation, computer-aided detection, computer-aided c...

The 2018 RSNA Summit on AI in Radiology brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to identify and prioritize areas of need related to artificial intelligence in radiology. This article presents the proceedings of the summit with emphasis on RSNA's role in leading, organizing, and catalyzing change during this important time in radiology. © R...

Large, labeled datasets have driven deep learning methods to achieve expert-level performance on a variety of medical imaging tasks. We present CheXpert, a large dataset that contains 224,316 chest radiographs of 65,240 patients. We design a labeler to automatically detect the presence of 14 observations in radiology reports, capturing uncertaintie...

Background Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the knee is the preferred method for diagnosing knee injuries. However, interpretation of knee MRI is time-intensive and subject to diagnostic error and variability. An automated system for interpreting knee MRI could prioritize high-risk patients and assist clinicians in making diagnoses. Deep learnin...

MRNet implementation for external validation. (ZIP)

Statistical analysis. (RMD)

Magnetic resonance imaging settings and parameters for the Stanford musculoskeletal knee protocol. (DOCX)

Comparison of individual unassisted and model-assisted clinical experts on the validation set. (DOCX)