Validating the knowledge represented by a self-organizing map with an expert-derived knowledge structure

• Published in: BMC medical education Vol. 24; no. 1; pp. 416 - 16
• Main Authors: Amos, Andrew James, Lee, Kyungmi, Gupta, Tarun Sen, Malau-Aduli, Bunmi S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London BioMed Central 16.04.2024; BioMed Central Ltd; BMC
• Subjects: Adult; Algorithms; Analysis; Artificial intelligence; Bias; Cardiovascular disease; Child; Cognitive Structures; Curricula; Curriculum development; Curriculum planning; Data mining; Education; Educational aspects; Evidence; Explainable AI; Females; Humans; Knowledge; Machine Learning; Medical Education; Medical literature; Medical research; Medicine; Methods; Neural networks; Patients; Physicians; Psychiatrists; Psychiatry; Scientometrics; Teaching Methods; Technology application; Theory of Medicine/Bioethics; Womens health; Australia; Medical education; Scientometrics; Explainable AI; Artificial intelligence; Curriculum development; Machine learning
• ISSN: 1472-6920; 1472-6920
• DOI: 10.1186/s12909-024-05352-y

Background Professionals are reluctant to make use of machine learning results for tasks like curriculum development if they do not understand how the results were generated and what they mean. Visualizations of peer reviewed medical literature can summarize enormous amounts of information but are difficult to interpret. This article reports the validation of the meaning of a self-organizing map derived from the Medline/PubMed index of peer reviewed medical literature by its capacity to coherently summarize the references of a core psychiatric textbook. Methods Reference lists from ten editions of Kaplan and Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry were projected onto a self-organizing map trained on Medical Subject Headings annotating the complete set of peer reviewed medical research articles indexed in the Medline/PubMed database (MedSOM). K-means clustering was applied to references from every edition to examine the ability of the self-organizing map to coherently summarize the knowledge contained within the textbook. Results MedSOM coherently clustered references into six psychiatric knowledge domains across ten editions (1967–2017). Clustering occurred at the abstract level of broad psychiatric practice including General/adult psychiatry, Child psychiatry, and Administrative psychiatry. Conclusions The uptake of visualizations of published medical literature by medical experts for purposes like curriculum development depends upon validation of the meaning of the visualizations. The current research demonstrates that a self-organizing map (MedSOM) can validate the stability and coherence of the references used to support the knowledge claims of a standard psychiatric textbook, linking the products of machine learning to a widely accepted standard of knowledge.