Machine Learning Demonstrates High Accuracy for Disease Diagnosis and Prognosis in Plastic Surgery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".