Communication and replication articles from across Nature Portfolio

The Open Institute of the African BioGenome Project empowers African scientists and institutions with the skill sets, capacity and infrastructure to advance scientific knowledge and innovation and drive economic growth.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine has grown rapidly, yet few algorithms have been deployed. It is not the problem with the AI itself but with the way functions and results are communicated. Regulatory science provides the appropriate language and solutions to this problem for three reasons: First, there is value in the intentionally interdisciplinary regulatory language. Second, regulatory concepts are important for AI researchers because these concepts enable tackling of risk and safety concerns as well as understanding of recently proposed regulations in the US and Europe. Third, regulatory science is a scientific discipline that evaluates and challenges current regulation—aiming for evidence-based improvements. Knowledge of the regulatory language, concepts, and science should be regarded a core competency for communicating medical innovation. Regulatory grade communication will be the key to bringing medical AI from hype to standard of care. Foregoing the possible benefits of regulatory science as a unifying force for the realization of medical AI is a missed opportunity.

Here we present the MI-CLAIM checklist, a tool intended to improve transparent reporting of AI algorithms in medicine.

We outline a principled approach to data FAIRification rooted in the notions of experimental design, and whose main intent is to clarify the semantics of data matrices. Using two related metabolomics datasets associated to journal articles, we perform retrospective data and metadata curation and re-annotation, using community, open, interoperability standards. The results are semantically-anchored data matrices, deposited in public archives, which are readable by software agents for data-level queries, and which can support the reproducibility and reuse of the data underpinning the publications.

Digital medicine's extraordinary ability to communicate with patients, especially in under-served communities, could help reorient the biotech industry to better address aging and its associated diseases.