Cited by 53Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and EducationBiomedical Text Mining and OntologiesMachine Learning in Healthcare

Benchmark datasets driving artificial intelligence development fail to capture the needs of medical professionals

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Blagec, Kathrin, Kraiger, Jakob, Frühwirt, Wolfgang, Samwald, Matthias·2023·Journal of Biomedical Informatics

Abstract

Publicly accessible benchmarks that allow for assessing and comparing model performances are important drivers of progress in artificial intelligence (AI). While recent advances in AI capabilities hold the potential to transform medical practice by assisting and augmenting the cognitive processes of healthcare professionals, the coverage of clinically relevant tasks by AI benchmarks is largely unclear. Furthermore, there is a lack of systematized meta-information that allows clinical AI researchers to quickly determine accessibility, scope, content and other characteristics of datasets and benchmark datasets relevant to the clinical domain. To address these issues, we curated and released a comprehensive catalogue of datasets and benchmarks pertaining to the broad domain of clinical and biomedical natural language processing (NLP), based on a systematic review of literature and. A total of 450 NLP datasets were manually systematized and annotated with rich metadata, such as targeted tasks, clinical applicability, data types, performance metrics, accessibility and licensing information, and availability of data splits. We then compared tasks covered by AI benchmark datasets with relevant tasks that medical practitioners reported as highly desirable targets for automation in a previous empirical study. Our analysis indicates that AI benchmarks of direct clinical relevance are scarce and fail to cover most work activities that clinicians want to see addressed. In particular, tasks associated with routine documentation and patient data administration workflows are not represented despite significant associated workloads. Thus, currently available AI benchmarks are improperly aligned with desired targets for AI automation in clinical settings, and novel benchmarks should be created to fill these gaps.

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  • Clinical FMs lack the shared evaluation frameworks and datasets that have underpinned progress in other fields such as natural language processing and computer vision.

    “Clinical FMs lack the shared evaluation frameworks and datasets20 that have underpinned progress in other fields, such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision21.”

    From The shaky foundations of large language models and foundation models for electronic health records (2023) · cites this paper as [20]

    The Introduction describes public benchmarks as shared, standardized ways to compare AI models, and the Analysis of benchmark datasets finds that few benchmarks have direct clinical relevance. But the paper examines clinical and biomedical AI benchmarks, not clinical foundation models specifically; it also identifies some existing clinical benchmarks rather than a complete lack of them. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.86)

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Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. A. Ben Abacha, V.V. Datla, S.A. Hasan, D. Demner-Fushman, H. Müller, Overview of the VQA-Med Task at ImageCLEF 2020: Visual Question Answering and Generation in the Medical Domain., CEUR Workshop Proceedings; 2020.
  2. V. Nguyen, S. Karimi, S. Falamaki, C. Paris, Benchmarking Clinical Decision Support Search. ArXiv 2018. 10.48550/arxiv.1801.09322. · DOI
  3. D. Mowery, ShAReCLEF eHealth 2013: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval for Clinical Care, PhysioNet 2020. 10.13026/0zsp-0e97. · DOI
  4. P. Messina, P. Pino, D. Parra, A. Soto, C. Besa, S. Uribe, et al. A Survey on Deep Learning and Explainability for Automatic Report Generation from Medical Images. ArXiv 2020. 10.48550/arxiv.2010.10563. · DOI

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Authors
Blagec, K., Kraiger, J., Frühwirt, W., & Samwald, M.
Affiliations
Medical University of Vienna (AT)
Venue
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2023-01
Volume
137
Pages
104274
ISSN
1532-0464 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4312055891
Cited by
47
References
34
Citations by year
2026: 19 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 3
FWCI
0.48
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Journal of Biomedical Informatics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
Horizon 2020 (668353)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
Keywords
AI benchmarks, clinical natural language processing, dataset metadata, clinical AI, clinician workload, clinical documentation automation, AI-assisted clinical decision support
MeSH terms
Artificial Intelligence, Humans, Natural Language Processing, Benchmarking

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