AI in Radiology: Tim’s Journey

Podcast host Dr. Heather Bassett interviewed Dr. Tim O’Connell, a radiologist and co-founder of emtelligent, a company specializing in processing unstructured clinical data. They discussed Tim’s background in enterprise IT before transitioning to medicine and his work in medical informatics at the University of British Columbia. Tim’s experience with AI in radiology, particularly his collaboration with Dr. Anoop Sarkar, led the duo to co-found emtelligent. Their work together resulted in the creation of emtelliPro®, the company’s deep learning-based medical language understanding engine. Tim’s interest in using AI to improve care delivery is rooted in his personal experience as a clinician — and in helping other clinicians better understand patient stories amidst increasing imaging volumes.

AI in Radiology Career Insights

Tim and Heather discussed their career paths, with Tim sharing his transition from engineering to medicine and radiology, while Heather mentioned her background in technology and medicine. They explored the potential of AI in radiology, with Tim expressing excitement about AI’s ability to assist with detection tasks and provide a second set of eyes for diagnostic imaging. Tim also noted that AI models have room for improvement in interpreting data and synthesizing information from multiple sources, an area where human expertise currently excels.

AI in Medical Imaging Evolution

Tim and Heather discussed the evolution of AI in medical imaging and clinical data analysis. Tim shared his background in radiology and imaging informatics, highlighting the challenges of interpreting medical images and the potential of AI to assist in detecting anomalies. Heather emphasized the complexity of clinical documentation and the improvements brought by generative AI and large language models in parsing and contextualizing medical records. Both agreed on the transformative potential of AI in enhancing diagnostic accuracy and clinical workflows.

Deep Learning in Medical NLP

Tim explained the evolution of deep learning and transformer models, highlighting their impact on natural language processing tasks and their current ability to achieve high accuracy levels — exceeding 98-99% for specific tasks like chart review and data extraction. He emphasized emtelligent’s differentiators, including determinism, scalability to process large volumes of documents, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to operate within customers’ clouds for security and confidentiality. Tim also noted that many medical problems are long-tail issues, where the final 5% of accuracy can be challenging to achieve.

AI in Healthcare: Human Context

Tim discussed emtelligent’s software capabilities for processing unstructured clinical data, including handling various data formats and enabling interoperability through ontologies like SNOMED (Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine) Clinical Terminology — the most comprehensive, multilingual, clinical healthcare terminology in the world, used to record clinical information in the patient record. He emphasized the importance of human-in-the-loop AI systems in healthcare to ensure safety and reliability, while Heather highlighted the need to make AI tools valuable to physicians to drive adoption. They agreed that while AI can transform healthcare workflows, human context and judgment remain crucial.

Tim O’Connell on LinkedIn

emtelligent on LinkedIn

emtelligent website

Host
Heather Bassett, MD
Chief Medical Officer
Xsolis

Dr. Heather Bassett continues to drive AI innovation in healthcare to address operational challenges for health systems and plans, guiding them toward positive operational and patient outcomes. Rare among Chief Medical Officers at healthcare technology companies, she leads both the clinical services and data science teams. She architected Xsolis’ Care Level Score™, which integrates clinical expertise and data science to provide a numerical representation of the appropriate care status for each patient. This score and Xsolis’ AI-driven platform, Dragonfly, are uniting payers and providers during concurrent authorization processes to improve utilization management, patient outcomes, and reduce costs. Dragonfly is in use at hundreds of hospitals, health systems and health plans across America.

Dr. Bassett is passionate about advancing responsible AI in healthcare and is actively leading Xsolis’ involvement with the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), an organization advancing the responsible development, deployment, and oversight of AI in healthcare, which Xsolis joined as an Early Member. Dr. Bassett was recognized by Nashville Business Journal’s Health Care Innovation Awards as Chief Medical Officer of the Year 2021 and by Becker’s Hospital Review’s Women in Health IT to Know 2023-2025. She has contributed articles or been featured in Newsweek, Forbes, AARP Magazine, InformationWeek, Becker’s, Fierce Healthcare, Medical Economics, MedCity News, Physicians Practice, and Patient Safety Quality Healthcare.

She earned a B.S. in biological sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and her Doctor of Medicine from the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, where she worked as a research associate in the field of DNA repair. She undertook her residency in internal medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and worked as a hospitalist at Centennial Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., for eight years. She is board-certified in internal medicine.

Guest
Tim O’Connell, MD, CEO and Co-Founder
emtelligent

Dr. Tim O’Connell is a practicing radiologist in Vancouver and cofounded emtelligent in 2016. He has served as vice chair of medical informatics in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Radiology since 2017. Prior to his clinical and entrepreneurial careers, Dr. O’Connell worked as an IT professional for Nortel Networks and Bell, where he was director of engineering for the Bank of Montreal account.

Early in his career, Dr. O’Connell realized that radiologists were often tasked with a volume of work that didn’t afford them the time needed to carefully review and understand each patient’s clinical history. In 2015, he met Dr. Anoop Sarkar, a widely published Ph.D. and full professor of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence. Dr. Sarkar shared Tim’s interest in medical language processing and desire to develop meaningful solutions that would have a positive impact on the lives of patients and care providers. It quickly became obvious to both that they were perfectly matched to solve the problem Tim had identified, together bringing a powerful combination of deep clinical and data science expertise.

emtelligent was officially formed when Drs. O’Connell and Sarkar joined forces with Jeff O’Connell, an experienced technology operations management leader; and Dan Carriere, a seasoned expert in building and scaling biomedical startup ventures, adding experienced entrepreneurship and business leadership to the team. Collectively, the team successfully built and launched emtelliPro®, one of the industry’s first deep-learning-based Medical Language Understanding engines.