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With each passing year, the state-of-the-art deep learning neural networks grow larger in size, requiring larger computing and power resources. The high compute resources required by these large networks are alienating the majority of the world population that lives in low-resource settings and lacks the infrastructure to benefit from these advancements in medical AI. Current state-of-the-art medical AI, even with cloud resources, is a bit difficult to deploy in remote areas where we don’t have good internet connectivity. We demonstrate a cost-effective approach to deploying medical AI that could be used in limited resource settings using Edge Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). We trained and optimized a classification model on the Chest X-ray 14 dataset and a segmentation model on the Nerve ultrasound dataset using INT8 Quantization Aware Training. Thereafter, we compiled the optimized models for Edge TPU execution. We find that the inference performance on edge TPUs is 10x faster compared to other embedded devices. The optimized model is 3x and 12x smaller for the classification and segmentation respectively, compared to the full precision model. In summary, we show the potential of Edge TPUs for two medical AI tasks with faster inference times, which could potentially be used in low-resource settings for medical AI-based diagnostics. We finally discuss some potential challenges and limitations of our approach for real-world deployments. 

The management of blood glucose levels is critical in the care of Type 1 diabetes subjects. In extremes, high or low levels of blood glucose are fatal. To avoid such adverse events, there is the development and adoption of wearable technologies that continuously monitor blood glucose and administer insulin. This technology allows subjects to easily track their blood glucose levels with early intervention without the need for hospital visits. The data collected from these sensors is an excellent candidate for the application of machine learning algorithms to learn patterns and predict future values of blood glucose levels. In this study, we developed artificial neural network algorithms based on the OhioT1DM training dataset that contains data on 12 subjects. The dataset contains features such as subject identifiers, continuous glucose monitoring data obtained in 5 minutes intervals, insulin infusion rate, etc. We developed individual models, including LSTM, BiLSTM, Convolutional LSTMs, TCN, and sequence-to-sequence models. We also developed transfer learning models based on the most important features of the data, as identified by a gradient boosting algorithm. These models were evaluated on the OhioT1DM test dataset that contains 6 unique subject’s data. The model with the lowest RMSE values for the 30- and 60-minutes was selected as the best performing model. Our result shows that sequence-to-sequence BiLSTM performed better than the other models. This work demonstrates the potential of artificial neural networks algorithms in the management of Type 1 diabetes. 

Purpose: Despite tremendous gains from deep learning and the promise of AI in medicine to improve diagnosis and save costs, there exists a large translational gap to implement and use AI products in real-world clinical situations. Adoption of standards like the TRIPOD, CONSORT, and CLAIM checklists is increasing to improve the peer review process and reporting of AI tools. However, no such standards exist for product level review. Methods: A review of the clinical trials shows a paucity of evidence for radiology AI products; thus, we developed a 10-question assessment tool for reviewing AI products with an emphasis on their validation and result dissemination. We applied the assessment tool to commercial and open-source algorithms used for diagnosis to extract evidence on the clinical utility of the tools. Results: We find that there is limited technical information on methodologies for FDA approved algorithms compared to open source products, likely due to concerns of intellectual property. Furthermore, we find that FDA approved products use much smaller datasets compared to open-source AI tools, as the terms of use of public datasets are limited to academic and non-commercial entities which preclude their use in commercial products. Conclusion: Overall, we observe a broad spectrum of maturity and clinical use of AI products, but a large gap exists in exploring the actual performance of AI tools in clinical practice.