A Modified Dempster Shafer Approach to Classification in Surgical Skill Assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artificial intelligence systems are usually implemented either using machine learning or expert systems. Machine learning methods are usually more accurate and applicable to a broader range of applications. Expert systems, on the other hand, require much less data for training and generate more comprehensible results. These characteristics are typically desired in the fields of surgery and medicine because there isn't much data available. In order to give a machine's decisions a deeper level of semantics, it is also advantageous to incorporate a doctor's expertise into it. Furthermore, it is safer to understand the reasoning behind a machine's choices. In this paper, a Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) based expert system is suggested for the task of surgical training skill assessment. An interval-based probabilistic feature analysis was applied to the data to assign values to the mass functions. Zhang's rule of combination was applied to handle the conflicting evidence in the prediction phase. The performance of the proposed method was compared to another DST classifier, SVM, and XGBoost. Our method outperforms SVM and other DST classifiers, but it is not as precise as XGBoost. By reducing the size of the dataset, the added benefit of using an expert system as opposed to a machine learning method was explored further. The performance of the suggested method is not adversely affected by the size of the dataset, whereas the XGBoost classifier is.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".