Designing an AI-driven System at Scale for Detection of Abusive Head Trauma using Domain Modeling

Traumatic injuries are the leading cause of death in children under 18, with head trauma being the leading cause of death in children below 5. A large but unknown number of traumatic injuries are non-accidental, i.e. inflicted. The lack of sensitivity and specificity required to diagnose Abusive Head Trauma (AHT) from radiological studies results in putting the children at risk of re-injury and death. Modern Deep Learning techniques can be utilized to detect Abusive Head Trauma using Computer Tomography (CT) scans. Training models using these techniques are only a part of building AI-driven Computer-Aided Diagnostic systems. There are challenges in deploying the models to make them highly available and scalable.

The thesis models the domain of Abusive Head Trauma using Deep Learning techniques and builds an AI-driven System at scale using best Software Engineering Practices. It has been done in collaboration with Phoenix Children Hospital (PCH). The thesis breaks down AHT into sub-domains of Medical Knowledge, Data Collection, Data Pre-processing, Image Generation, Image Classification, Building APIs, Containers and Kubernetes. Data Collection and Pre-processing were done at PCH with the help of trauma researchers and radiologists. Experiments are run using Deep Learning models such as DCGAN (for Image Generation), Pretrained 2D and custom 3D CNN classifiers for the classification tasks. The trained models are exposed as APIs using the Flask web framework, contained using Docker and deployed on a Kubernetes cluster.



The results are analyzed based on the accuracy of the models, the feasibility of their implementation as APIs and load testing the Kubernetes cluster. They suggest the need for Data Annotation at the Slice level for CT scans and an increase in the Data Collection process. Load Testing reveals the auto-scalability feature of the cluster to serve a high number of requests.