Thank you for supporting much-needed research into juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA)!
Your donations this Christmas have helped local researchers analyse more than 25,000 X-rays to develop their artificial intelligence (AI) model to improve diagnosis of JIA!
This is life-changing research that will help thousands of families like Josh’s (pictured top) faced with an uncertain diagnosis journey.
At the moment, it takes an average of 10 months for children to receive a JIA diagnosis from the moment the pain begins. This includes multiple specialist visits to painful and expensive diagnostic tests, with some tests even requiring a general anaesthetic.
Thanks to your support, Dr Zhibin Liao (pictured right) and his team at the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning have been working hard to progress their AI model to improve diagnosis.
And so far, the early signs are positive!
“Our X-ray AI model achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy on a large list of 75 medical findings, which include important arthritis characteristics such as joint erosion and abnormalities,” Dr Liao said.
“Our model also pinpoints the precise location of the abnormal regions in the image, which explains the AI decision and assists the doctors in verifying the model’s decision.”
Plus, on early studies that looked at bone, soft tissue and joint abnormalities, Dr Liao’s model has achieved an 85% accuracy rate!
However, it is important to note that these are early findings and still need to be validated and peer-reviewed.
Thank you for supporting much-needed research into JIA. We’ll continue to keep you updated!
