Machine Learning in Clinical Decision Making: Applications, Data Limitations and Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Recent progress in machine learning (ML) has fueled the emergence of intelligent clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) designed to optimize diagnostic and prognostic accuracy through the analysis of complex and heterogeneous medical data. The analysis provides a comprehensive perspective on the use of machine learning in the medical field by integrating a bibliometric assessment of the recent literature and a detailed examination of the algorithms used in current studies. The bibliometric component highlights the evolution of publications, the thematic distribution of research and emerging directions within various medical specialties. In addition, the evaluation of selected articles sheds light on the concrete ways of applying ML algorithms, as well as the methodological limitations encountered in clinical practice. Random forest and gradient boosting are commonly used in internal medicine and cardiology, while convolutional neural networks (CNNs) dominate neuroimaging in neurology and image-based analyses in oncology and radiology.