Capturing Requirements for a Data Annotation Tool for Intensive Care: Experimental User-Centered Design Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Increasing use of computational methods in health care provides opportunities to address previously unsolvable problems. Machine learning techniques applied to routinely collected data can enhance clinical tools and improve patient outcomes, but their effective deployment comes with significant challenges. While some tasks can be addressed by training machine learning models directly on the collected data, more complex problems require additional input in the form of data annotations. Data annotation is a complex and time-consuming problem that requires domain expertise and frequently, technical proficiency. With clinicians' time being an extremely limited resource, existing tools fail to provide an effective workflow for deployment in health care. OBJECTIVE: This paper investigates the approach of intensive care unit staff to the task of data annotation. Specifically, it aims to (1) understand how clinicians approach data annotation and (2) capture the requirements for a digital annotation tool for the health care setting. METHODS: We conducted an experimental activity involving annotation of the printed excerpts of real time-series admission data with 7 intensive care unit clinicians. Each participant annotated an identical set of admissions with the periods of weaning from mechanical ventilation during a single 45-minute workshop. Participants were observed during task completion and their actions were analyzed within Norman's Interaction Cycle model to identify the software requirements. RESULTS: Clinicians followed a cyclic process of investigation, annotation, data reevaluation, and label refinement. Variety of techniques were used to investigate data and create annotations. We identified 11 requirements for the digital tool across 4 domains: annotation of individual admissions (n=5), semiautomated annotation (n=3), operational constraints (n=2), and use of labels in machine learning (n=1). CONCLUSIONS: Effective data annotation in a clinical setting relies on flexibility in analysis and label creation and workflow continuity across multiple admissions. There is a need to ensure a seamless transition between data investigation, annotation, and refinement of the labels.
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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 | 0.076 | 0.117 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".