Deep into Laboratory: An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Recommend Laboratory Tests

Laboratory tests are performed to make effective clinical decisions. However, inappropriate laboratory test ordering hampers patient care and increases financial burden for healthcare. An automated laboratory test recommendation system can provide rapid and appropriate test selection, potentially improving the workflow to help physicians spend more time treating patients. The main objective of this study was to develop a deep learning-based automated system to recommend appropriate laboratory tests. A retrospective data collection was performed at the National Health Insurance database between 1 January 2013, and 31 December 2013. We included all prescriptions that had at least one laboratory test. A total of 1,463,837 prescriptions from 530,050 unique patients was included in our study. Of these patients, 296,541 were women (55.95%), the range of age was between 1 and 107 years. The deep learning (DL) model achieved a higher area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC micro = 0.98, and AUROC macro = 0.94). The findings of this study show that the DL model can accurately and efficiently identify laboratory tests. This model can be integrated into existing workflows to reduce under- and over-utilization problems.

Automated summary

This study developed a deep learning-based automated system to recommend appropriate laboratory tests, showing that the model can accurately and efficiently identify laboratory tests, and can be integrated into existing workflows to reduce under- and over-utilization problems.