Artificial intelligence in emergency medicine. A systematic literature review

Abstract

Motivation and objective: Emergency medicine is becoming a popular application area for artificial intelligence methods but remains less investigated than other healthcare branches. The need for time-sensitive decision-making on the basis of high data volumes makes the use of quantitative technologies inevitable. However, the specifics of healthcare regulations impose strict requirements for such applications. Published contributions cover separate parts of emergency medicine and use disparate data and algorithms. This study aims to systematize the relevant contributions, investigate the main obstacles to artificial intelligence applications in emergency medicine, and propose directions for further studies.

Methods: The contributions selection process was conducted with systematic electronic databases querying and filtering with respect to established exclusion criteria. Among the 380 papers gathered from IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Springer Library, ScienceDirect, and Nature databases 116 were considered to be a part of the survey. The main features of the selected papers are the focus on emergency medicine and the use of machine learning or deep learning algorithms.

Findings and discussion: The selected papers were classified into two branches: diagnostics-specific and triage-specific. The former ones are focused on either diagnosis prediction or decision support. The latter covers such applications as mortality, outcome, admission prediction, condition severity estimation, and urgent care prediction. The observed contributions are highly specialized within a single disease or medical operation and often use privately collected retrospective data, making them incomparable. These and other issues can be addressed by creating an end-to-end solution based on human-machine interaction.

Conclusion: Artificial intelligence applications are finding their place in emergency medicine, while most of the corresponding studies remain isolated and lack higher generalization and more sophisticated methodology, which can be a matter of forthcoming improvements.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Deep learning; Emergency medicine; Machine learning; Systematic literature review.