Modelling the impact of AI for clinical decision support

Abstract

Many AI (or ML) systems have been proposed for clinical decision support. Clinical usefulness is assessed in an ‘Impact Study’, a form of trial of a completed system. In development, in contrast, the focus is on AI accuracy measures, such as the AUC. To improve impact and to justify the cost of a study, the impact of a proposed AI system should be modelled during its development. We show that an Influence Diagram can be used for this and provide a small set of generic models for diagnostic AI systems. We show that how the AI interacts with clinical decision makers is at least as important as its predictive accuracy.