Development and evaluation of AI-based clinical decision support system for streamlining breast multidisciplinary...

Multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings are key to delivering cancer care. Increasing caseload and limited resources make them less effective and unsustainable. The aim of this quality improvement project was to assess novel artificial intelligence-based clinical decision support (CDS) technology to develop and validate standard of care (SoC) to streamline the breast MDT meetings in a tertiary cancer centre.

A clinical governance group of the MDT approved international guidelines used to develop SoC. Deontics CDS was assessed for its suitability to apply the SoC pathway for benign and malignant breast disease with the exclusion of metastatic and recurrent cancer.

Patients discussed over the preceding 16 months were added to the platform in cohorts of 50 women: two consisting of 50 women each diagnosed with benign disease (benign A and B: n=100) and three consisting of 50 women each diagnosed with malignant disease (cancer A, B and C: n=150). Concordance between the blinded MDT decision outcomes and SoC recommendations was analysed. This stepwise approach identified knowledge gaps in SoC and refined the CDS. Concordance improved from 82% to 100% in benign and from 94% to 100% in malignant cases.

A sequential process of validating the SoC with data derived from the development of evidence-based SoC protocols based on international guidelines resulted in a final 100% concordance rate between the platform and MDT recommendations for both benign and malignant disease.

CDS technology could be a milestone in using SoC to deliver a sustainable clinical decision pathway.