Predictive Modeling for Personalized Three-Dimensional Burn Injury Assessments

Artificial intelligence in the management and treatment of burns: a systematic review

BACKGROUND

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an innovative field with potential for improving burn care. This article provides an updated review on machine learning in burn care and discusses future challenges and the role of healthcare professionals in the successful implementation of AI technologies.

METHODS

A systematic search was carried out on MEDLINE, Embase and PubMed databases for English-language articles studying machine learning in burns. Articles were reviewed quantitatively and qualitatively for clinical applications, key features, algorithms, outcomes and validation methods.

RESULTS

A total of 46 observational studies were included for review. Assessment of burn depth (n = 26), support vector machines (n = 19) and 10-fold cross-validation (n = 11) were the most common application, algorithm and validation tool used, respectively.

CONCLUSION

AI should be incorporated into clinical practice as an adjunct to the experienced burns provider once direct comparative analysis to current gold standards outlining its benefits and risks have been studied. Future considerations must include the development of a burn-specific common framework. Authors should use common validation tools to allow for effective comparisons. Level I/II evidence is required to produce robust proof about clinical and economic impacts.

Machine Learning Demonstrates High Accuracy for Disease Diagnosis and Prognosis in Plastic Surgery

INTRODUCTION

Machine learning (ML) is a set of models and methods that can detect patterns in vast amounts of data and use this information to perform various kinds of decision-making under uncertain conditions. This review explores the current role of this technology in plastic surgery by outlining the applications in clinical practice, diagnostic and prognostic accuracies, and proposed future direction for clinical applications and research.

METHODS

EMBASE, MEDLINE, CENTRAL and ClinicalTrials.gov were searched from 1990 to 2020. Any clinical studies (including case reports) which present the diagnostic and prognostic accuracies of machine learning models in the clinical setting of plastic surgery were included. Data collected were clinical indication, model utilised, reported accuracies, and comparison with clinical evaluation.

RESULTS

The database identified 1181 articles, of which 51 articles were included in this review. The clinical utility of these algorithms was to assist clinicians in diagnosis prediction (n=22), outcome prediction (n=21) and pre-operative planning (n=8). The mean accuracy is 88.80%, 86.11% and 80.28% respectively. The most commonly used models were neural networks (n=31), support vector machines (n=13), decision trees/random forests (n=10) and logistic regression (n=9).

CONCLUSIONS

ML has demonstrated high accuracies in diagnosis and prognostication of burn patients, congenital or acquired facial deformities, and in cosmetic surgery. There are no studies comparing ML to clinician's performance. Future research can be enhanced using larger datasets or utilising data augmentation, employing novel deep learning models, and applying these to other subspecialties of plastic surgery.