Best Practices and Checklist for Reviewing Artificial Intelligence-Based Medical Imaging Papers: Classification

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies and their application to medical imaging has led to an explosion of related research programs utilizing AI to produce state-of-the-art classification performance. Ideally, research culminates in dissemination of the findings in peer-reviewed journals. To date, acceptance or rejection criteria are often subjective; however, reproducible science requires reproducible review. The Machine Learning Education Sub-Committee of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) has identified a knowledge gap and need to establish guidelines for reviewing these studies. This present work, written from the machine learning practitioner standpoint, follows a similar approach to our previous paper related to segmentation. In this series, the committee will address best practices to follow in AI-based studies and present the required sections with examples and discussion of requirements to make the studies cohesive, reproducible, accurate, and self-contained. This entry in the series focuses on image classification. Elements like dataset curation, data pre-processing steps, reference standard identification, data partitioning, model architecture, and training are discussed. Sections are presented as in a typical manuscript. The content describes the information necessary to ensure the study is of sufficient quality for publication consideration and, compared with other checklists, provides a focused approach with application to image classification tasks. The goal of this series is to provide resources to not only help improve the review process for AI-based medical imaging papers, but to facilitate a standard for the information that should be presented within all components of the research study.