Repurposing adult AI radiograph models for neonatal care through continual learning: an international multicentre study

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Abstract
Despite growing clinical adoption of artificial intelligence in radiology, fewer than one in five commercially available models are cleared for paediatric use. Existing systems are trained predominantly on adult data and generalize poorly to neonates, yet efficient strategies for repurposing them without data sharing or large-scale local data curation are lacking. Here we present an international retrospective study of neonatal chest radiographs from 30 neonatal intensive care units across 20 countries and territories, evaluating continual learning as a privacy-preserving approach to adapt a deep learning model for adult endotracheal tube assessment to neonatal care. Each hospital contributed 50 radiographs for sequential model retraining without centralized data pooling. Continual learning achieved lower anatomical landmark localization error (0.67 cm versus 1.29 cm for hospital-specific fine-tuning and 4.30 cm for adult-only models) at 29 of 30 sites, with improved detection of deep intubations at 27 of 30 sites. These findings demonstrate that privacy-preserving collaborative learning can address critical gaps in paediatric AI deployment.

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