Precision Radiotherapy via Information Integration of Expert Human Knowledge and AI Recommendation to Optimize Clinical Decision Making

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic method combining expert human knowledge with AI recommendations using Gaussian processes and neural networks to improve precision radiotherapy decision making, validated on lung cancer patient data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration framework of human expertise and AI using uncertainty quantification to enhance clinical radiotherapy decisions.

Findings

Improved AI model performance through expert knowledge integration

Quantified uncertainty in treatment outcome predictions

Validated approach on real patient data with promising results

Abstract

In the precision medicine era, there is a growing need for precision radiotherapy where the planned radiation dose needs to be optimally determined by considering a myriad of patient-specific information in order to ensure treatment efficacy. Existing artificial-intelligence (AI) methods can recommend radiation dose prescriptions within the scope of this available information. However, treating physicians may not fully entrust the AI's recommended prescriptions due to known limitations or when the AI recommendation may go beyond physicians' current knowledge. This paper lays out a systematic method to integrate expert human knowledge with AI recommendations for optimizing clinical decision making. Towards this goal, Gaussian process (GP) models are integrated with deep neural networks (DNNs) to quantify the uncertainty of the treatment outcomes given by physicians and AI recommendations, respectively, which are further used as a guideline to educate clinical physicians and improve AI models performance. The proposed method is demonstrated in a comprehensive dataset where patient-specific information and treatment outcomes are prospectively collected during radiotherapy of $67$ non-small cell lung cancer patients and retrospectively analyzed.