Douglas G. Manuel

Arya Rahgozar, Pouria Mortezaagha, Jodi Edwards et al.

The Brain-Heart Interconnectome (BHI) combines neurology and cardiology but is hindered by inefficiencies in evidence synthesis, poor adherence to quality standards, and research waste. To address these challenges, we developed an AI-driven system to enhance systematic reviews in the BHI domain. The system integrates automated detection of Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, and Study design (PICOS), semantic search using vector embeddings, graph-based querying, and topic modeling to identify redundancies and underexplored areas. Core components include a Bi-LSTM model achieving 87% accuracy for PICOS compliance, a study design classifier with 95.7% accuracy, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with GPT-3.5, which outperformed GPT-4 for graph-based and topic-driven queries. The system provides real-time updates, reducing research waste through a living database and offering an interactive interface with dashboards and conversational AI. While initially developed for BHI, the system's adaptable architecture enables its application across various biomedical fields, supporting rigorous evidence synthesis, efficient resource allocation, and informed clinical decision-making.

André M. Carrington, Douglas G. Manuel, Paul W. Fieguth et al.

Optimal performance is critical for decision-making tasks from medicine to autonomous driving, however common performance measures may be too general or too specific. For binary classifiers, diagnostic tests or prognosis at a timepoint, measures such as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, or the area under the precision recall curve, are too general because they include unrealistic decision thresholds. On the other hand, measures such as accuracy, sensitivity or the F1 score are measures at a single threshold that reflect an individual single probability or predicted risk, rather than a range of individuals or risk. We propose a method in between, deep ROC analysis, that examines groups of probabilities or predicted risks for more insightful analysis. We translate esoteric measures into familiar terms: AUC and the normalized concordant partial AUC are balanced average accuracy (a new finding); the normalized partial AUC is average sensitivity; and the normalized horizontal partial AUC is average specificity. Along with post-test measures, we provide a method that can improve model selection in some cases and provide interpretation and assurance for patients in each risk group. We demonstrate deep ROC analysis in two case studies and provide a toolkit in Python.