From Signal to Knowledge: The Diagnostic Value of Raw Data in the Artificial Intelligence Prediction of Human Data for the First Time

Encouraging and astonishing developments have recently been achieved in image-based diagnostic technology. Modern medical care and imaging technology are becoming increasingly inseparable. However, the current diagnosis pattern of signal to image to knowledge inevitably leads to information distortion and noise introduction in the procedure of image reconstruction (from signal to image). Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that can mine knowledge from vast amounts of data offer opportunities to disrupt established workflows. In this prospective study, for the first time, we develop an AI-based signal-to-knowledge diagnostic scheme for lung nodule classification directly from the computed tomography (CT) raw data (the signal). We find that the raw data achieves almost comparable performance with CT, indicating that it is possible to diagnose diseases without reconstructing images. Moreover, the incorporation of raw data through three common convolutional network structures greatly improves the performance of the CT models in all cohorts (with a gain ranging from 0.01 to 0.12), demonstrating that raw data contains diagnostic information that CT does not possess. Our results break new ground and demonstrate the potential for direct signal-to-knowledge domain analysis.