Medical operational AI: artificial intelligence in routine medical operations

Abstract Despite substantial gains facilitated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years, it has to be applied very cautiously in sensitive domains like medicine due to the lack of explainability of many methods in this field. We aim to provide a system to overcome these issues of medical AI applications by means of our concept of medical operational AI detailed in this paper. We make use of various methods of AI and utilize knowledge graphs in particular. The latter is continuously updated by medical experts based on medical literature such as peer-reviewed papers and standard online sources such as UpToDate. We thoroughly derive a multi-level system tackling the corresponding challenges. In particular, its design encompasses (i) holistic diagnostic assistance on a macro level, (ii) predicitions and detailed suggestions for specific medical domains on a micro level, as well as (iii) AI-based optimizations of the overall system on a meta level. We detail practical merits of medical operational AI and discuss the state of the art beyond our solution.