Artificial Intelligence Techniques That May Be Applied to Primary Care Data to Facilitate Earlier Diagnosis of Cancer: Systematic Review
Cancer prognosis and disease burden are highly dependent on the disease stage at diagnosis, where earlier diagnoses have better outcomes. There is accumulating evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) can assist clinicians in making better clinical decisions in some areas of health care. This study aimed to systematically review AI techniques that may facilitate earlier diagnosis of cancer and could be applied to primary care electronic health record (EHR) data. 16 studies were included; representing the data of 3,862,910 patients. 13 studies described the initial development and testing of AI algorithms, and 3 studies described the validation of an AI algorithm in independent data sets, however, only 3 studies were based on primary care data. Having said that, no data was found on implementation barriers or cost-effectiveness of using AI. These results suggest further evidence is needed on AI performance using primary care data, implementation barriers, and cost-effectiveness before widespread adoption into routine primary care clinical practice can be recommended.