This episode discusses a study from New York University evaluating whether deep learning can predict acute pancreatitis severity from contrast-enhanced CT acquired within 24 hours of admission. Using self-supervised pretraining on about 12,000 unlabeled scans followed by supervised fine-tuning, the model achieved an AUROC near 0.89 for severe pancreatitis on both an internal NYU test set and an external multicenter Hungarian cohort of 518 patients, outperforming traditional clinical and imaging-based scoring systems. The work suggests that opportunistic AI triage on routinely acquired CT could support earlier, more accurate risk stratification in the emergency department.

Deep learning-based prediction of acute pancreatitis severity from abdominal CT with multicenter external validation. Xu et al. Radiology Advances, 2026, 3, umag020