MAIC–10 brief quality checklist for publications using artificial intelligence and medical images

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) with medical images to solve clinical problems is becoming increasingly common, and the development of new AI solutions is leading to more studies and publications using this computational technology. As a novel research area, the use of common standards to aid AI developers and reviewers as quality control criteria will improve the peer review process. Although some guidelines do exist, their heterogeneity and extension advocate that more explicit and simple schemes should be applied on the publication practice. Based on a review of existing AI guidelines, a proposal which collects, unifies, and simplifies the most relevant criteria was developed. The MAIC-10 (Must AI Criteria-10) checklist with 10 items was implemented as a guide to design studies and evaluate publications related to AI in the field of medical imaging. Articles published in Insights into Imaging in 2021 were selected to calculate their corresponding MAIC-10 quality score. The mean score was found to be 5.6 ± 1.6, with critical items present in most articles, such as “Clinical need”, “Data annotation”, “Robustness”, and “Transparency” present in more than 80% of papers, while improvements in other areas were identified. MAIC-10 was also observed to achieve the highest intra-observer reproducibility when compared to other existing checklists, with an overall reduction in terms of checklist length and complexity. In summary, MAIC-10 represents a short and simple quality assessment tool which is objective, robust and widely applicable to AI studies in medical imaging.