Medical Specialty Recommendations by an Artificial Intelligence Chatbot on a Smartphone: Development and Deployment.
The COVID-19 pandemic has limited daily activities and even contact between patients and primary care providers. This makes it more difficult to provide adequate primary care services, which include connecting patients to an appropriate medical specialist. A smartphone-compatible artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that classifies patients' symptoms and recommends the appropriate medical specialty could provide a valuable solution.
In order to establish a contactless method of recommending the appropriate medical specialty, this study aimed to construct a deep learning-based natural language processing (NLP) pipeline and to develop an AI chatbot that can be used on a smartphone.
We collected 118,008 sentences containing information on symptoms with labels (medical specialty), conducted data cleansing, and finally constructed a pipeline of 51,134 sentences for this study. Several deep learning models, including 4 different long short-term memory (LSTM) models with or without attention and with or without a pretrained FastText embedding layer, as well as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers for NLP, were trained and validated using a randomly selected test data set. The performance of the models was evaluated on the basis of the precision, recall, F1-score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). An AI chatbot was also designed to make it easy for patients to use this specialty recommendation system. We used an open-source framework called "Alpha" to develop our AI chatbot. This takes the form of a web-based app with a frontend chat interface capable of conversing in text and a backend cloud-based server application to handle data collection, process the data with a deep learning model, and offer the medical specialty recommendation in a responsive web that is compatible with both desktops and smartphones.
The bidirectional encoder representations from transformers model yielded the best performance, with an AUC of 0.964 and F1-score of 0.768, followed by LSTM model with embedding vectors, with an AUC of 0.965 and F1-score of 0.739. Considering the limitations of computing resources and the wide availability of smartphones, the LSTM model with embedding vectors trained on our data set was adopted for our AI chatbot service. We also deployed an Alpha version of the AI chatbot to be executed on both desktops and smartphones.
With the increasing need for telemedicine during the current COVID-19 pandemic, an AI chatbot with a deep learning-based NLP model that can recommend a medical specialty to patients through their smartphones would be exceedingly useful. This chatbot allows patients to identify the proper medical specialist in a rapid and contactless manner, based on their symptoms, thus potentially supporting both patients and primary care providers.
Lee H
，Kang J
，Yeo J
《JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH》
Leveraging code-free deep learning for pill recognition in clinical settings: A multicenter, real-world study of performance across multiple platforms.
Preventable patient harm, particularly medication errors, represent significant challenges in healthcare settings. Dispensing the wrong medication is often associated with mix-up of lookalike and soundalike drugs in high workload environments. Replacing manual dispensing with automated unit dose and medication dispensing systems to reduce medication errors is not always feasible in clinical facilities experiencing high patient turn-around or frequent dose changes. Artificial intelligence (AI) based pill recognition tools and smartphone applications could potentially aid healthcare workers in identifying pills in situations where more advanced dispensing systems are not implemented.
Most of the published research on pill recognition focuses on theoretical aspects of model development using traditional coding and deep learning methods. The use of code-free deep learning (CFDL) as a practical alternative for accessible model development, and implementation of such models in tools intended to aid decision making in clinical settings, remains largely unexplored. In this study, we sought to address this gap in existing literature by investigating whether CFDL is a viable approach for developing pill recognition models using a custom dataset, followed by a thorough evaluation of the model across various deployment scenarios, and in multicenter clinical settings. Furthermore, we aimed to highlight challenges and propose solutions to achieve optimal performance and real-world applicability of pill recognition models, including when deployed on smartphone applications.
A pill recognition model was developed utilizing Microsoft Azure Custom Vision platform and a large custom training dataset of 26,880 images captured from the top 30 most dispensed solid oral dosage forms (SODFs) at the three participating hospitals. A comprehensive internal and external testing strategy was devised, model's performance was investigated through the online API, and offline using exported TensorFlow Lite model running on a Windows PC and on Android, using a tailor-made testing smartphone application. Additionally, model's calibration, degree of reliance on color features and device dependency was thoroughly evaluated. Real-world performance was assessed using images captured by hospital pharmacists at three participating clinical centers.
The pill recognition model showed high performance in Microsoft Azure Custom Vision platform with 98.7 % precision, 95.1 % recall, and 98.2 % mean average precision (mAP), with thresholds set to 50 %. During internal testing utilizing the online API, the model reached 93.7 % precision, 88.96 % recall, 90.81 % F1-score and 87.35 % mAP. Testing the offline TensorFlow Lite model on Windows PC showed a slight performance reduction, with 91.16 % precision, 83.82 % recall, 86.18 % F1-score and 82.55 % mAP. Performance of the model running offline on the Android application was further reduced to 86.50 % precision, 75.00 % recall, 77.83 % F1-score and 69.24 % mAP. During external clinical testing through the online API an overall precision of 83.10 %, recall of 71.39 %, and F1-score of 75.76 % was achieved.
Our study demonstrates that using a CFDL approach is a feasible and cost-effective method for developing AI-based pill recognition systems. Despite the limitations encountered, our model performed well, particularly when accessed through the online API. The use of CFDL facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration, resulting in human-centered AI models with enhanced real-world applicability. We suggest that rather than striving to build a universally applicable pill recognition system, models should be tailored to the medications in a regional formulary or needs of a specific clinic, which can in turn lead to improved performance in real-world deployment in these locations. Parallel to focusing on model development, it is crucial to employ a human centered approach by training the end users on how to properly interact with the AI based system to maximize benefits. Future research is needed on refining pill recognition models for broader adaptability. This includes investigating image pre-processing and optimization techniques to enhance offline performance and operation on handheld devices. Moreover, future studies should explore methods to overcome limitations of CFDL development to enhance the robustness of models and reduce overfitting. Collaborative efforts between researchers in this domain and sharing of best practices are vital to improve pill recognition systems, ultimately enhancing patient safety and healthcare outcomes.
Ashraf AR
，Somogyi-Végh A
，Merczel S
，Gyimesi N
，Fittler A
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ResearchGate
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钛学术
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