Collective intelligence meets medical decision-making: the collective outperforms the best radiologist.

ABSTRACT: While collective intelligence (CI) is a powerful approach to increase decision accuracy, few attempts have been made to unlock its potential in medical decision-making. Here we investigated the performance of three well-known collective intelligence rules ("majority", "quorum", and "weighted quorum") when applied to mammography screening. For any particular mammogram, these rules aggregate the independent assessments of multiple radiologists into a single decision (recall the patient for additional workup or not). We found that, compared to single radiologists, any of these CI-rules both increases true positives (i.e., recalls of patients with cancer) and decreases false positives (i.e., recalls of patients without cancer), thereby overcoming one of the fundamental limitations to decision

SUBMITTER: Wolf M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4534443 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature