Dimensions of Human-Machine Combination: Prompting the Development of Deployable Intelligent Decision Systems for Situated Clinical Contexts

Whilst it is commonly reported that healthcare is set to benefit from advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is a consensus that, for clinical AI, a gulf exists between conception and implementation. Here we advocate the increased use of situated design and evaluation to close this gap, showing that in the literature there are comparatively few prospective situated studies. Focusing on the combined human-machine decision-making process - modelling, exchanging and resolving - we highlight the need for advances in exchanging and resolving. We present a novel relational space - contextual dimensions of combination - a means by which researchers, developers and clinicians can begin to frame the issues that must be addressed in order to close the chasm. We introduce a space of eight initial dimensions, namely participating agents, control relations, task overlap, temporal patterning, informational proximity, informational overlap, input influence and output representation coverage. We propose that our awareness of where we are in this space of combination will drive the development of interactions and the designs of AI models themselves. Designs that take account of how user-centered they will need to be for their performance to be translated into societal and individual benefit.