Bidirectional human-AI collaboration in brain tumour assessments improves both expert human and AI agent performance

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that bidirectional collaboration between humans and AI in brain tumour assessment enhances the performance, confidence, and consistency of both radiologists and AI agents, leading to better patient outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for reciprocal human-AI partnerships in healthcare, showing mutual performance improvements in brain tumour MRI analysis.

Findings

Human-AI partnerships improve diagnostic accuracy.

AI agents supported by radiologists perform better.

Synergistic effects lead to more confident and consistent assessments.

Abstract

The benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) human partnerships-evaluating how AI agents enhance expert human performance-are increasingly studied. Though rarely evaluated in healthcare, an inverse approach is possible: AI benefiting from the support of an expert human agent. Here, we investigate both human-AI clinical partnership paradigms in the magnetic resonance imaging-guided characterisation of patients with brain tumours. We reveal that human-AI partnerships improve accuracy and metacognitive ability not only for radiologists supported by AI, but also for AI agents supported by radiologists. Moreover, the greatest patient benefit was evident with an AI agent supported by a human one. Synergistic improvements in agent accuracy, metacognitive performance, and inter-rater agreement suggest that AI can create more capable, confident, and consistent clinical agents, whether human or model-based. Our work suggests that the maximal value of AI in healthcare could emerge not from replacing human intelligence, but from AI agents that routinely leverage and amplify it.