Data Harmonisation for Information Fusion in Digital Healthcare: A State-of-the-Art Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis and Future Research Directions

Removing the bias and variance of multicentre data has always been a challenge in large scale digital healthcare studies, which requires the ability to integrate clinical features extracted from data acquired by different scanners and protocols to improve stability and robustness. Previous studies have described various computational approaches to fuse single modality multicentre datasets. However, these surveys rarely focused on evaluation metrics and lacked a checklist for computational data harmonisation studies. In this systematic review, we summarise the computational data harmonisation approaches for multi-modality data in the digital healthcare field, including harmonisation strategies and evaluation metrics based on different theories. In addition, a comprehensive checklist that summarises common practices for data harmonisation studies is proposed to guide researchers to report their research findings more effectively. Last but not least, flowcharts presenting possible ways for methodology and metric selection are proposed and the limitations of different methods have been surveyed for future research.

FUTURE-AI: Guiding Principles and Consensus Recommendations for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) combined with the extensive amount of data generated by today's clinical systems, has led to the development of imaging AI solutions across the whole value chain of medical imaging, including image reconstruction, medical image segmentation, image-based diagnosis and treatment planning. Notwithstanding the successes and future potential of AI in medical imaging, many stakeholders are concerned of the potential risks and ethical implications of imaging AI solutions, which are perceived as complex, opaque, and difficult to comprehend, utilise, and trust in critical clinical applications. Despite these concerns and risks, there are currently no concrete guidelines and best practices for guiding future AI developments in medical imaging towards increased trust, safety and adoption. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a careful selection of guiding principles drawn from the accumulated experiences, consensus, and best practices from five large European projects on AI in Health Imaging. These guiding principles are named FUTURE-AI and its building blocks consist of (i) Fairness, (ii) Universality, (iii) Traceability, (iv) Usability, (v) Robustness and (vi) Explainability. In a step-by-step approach, these guidelines are further translated into a framework of concrete recommendations for specifying, developing, evaluating, and deploying technically, clinically and ethically trustworthy AI solutions into clinical practice.