Objectives Clinical discoveries are heralded by observing unique and unusual clinical cases. The effort of identifying such cases rests on the shoulders of busy clinicians. We assess the feasibility and applicability of an augmented intelligence framework to accelerate the rate of clinical discovery in preeclampsia and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy-an area that has seen little change in its clinical management. Methods We conducted a retrospective exploratory outlier analysis of participants enrolled in the folic acid clinical trial (FACT, N=2,301) and the Ottawa and Kingston birth cohort (OaK, N=8,085). We applied two outlier analysis methods: extreme misclassification contextual outlier and isolation forest point outlier. The extreme misclassification contextual outlier is based on a random forest predictive model for the outcome of preeclampsia in FACT and hypertensive disorder of pregnancy in OaK. We defined outliers in the extreme misclassification approach as mislabelled observations with a confidence level of more than 90%. Within the isolation forest approach, we defined outliers as observations with an average path length z score less or equal to -3, or more or equal to 3. Content experts reviewed the identified outliers and determined if they represented a potential novelty that could conceivably lead to a clinical discovery. Results In the FACT study, we identified 19 outliers using the isolation forest algorithm and 13 outliers using the random forest extreme misclassification approach. We determined that three (15.8%) and 10 (76.9%) were potential novelties, respectively. Out of 8,085 participants in the OaK study, we identified 172 outliers using the isolation forest algorithm and 98 outliers using the random forest extreme misclassification approach; four (2.3%) and 32 (32.7%), respectively, were potential novelties. Overall, the outlier analysis part of the augmented intelligence framework identified a total of 302 outliers. These were subsequently reviewed by content experts, representing the human part of the augmented intelligence framework. The clinical review determined that 49 of the 302 outliers represented potential novelties. Conclusions Augmented intelligence using extreme misclassification outlier analysis is a feasible and applicable approach for accelerating the rate of clinical discoveries. The use of an extreme misclassification contextual outlier analysis approach has resulted in a higher proportion of potential novelties than using the more traditional point outlier isolation forest approach. This finding was consistent in both the clinical trial and real-world cohort study data. Using augmented intelligence through outlier analysis has the potential to speed up the process of identifying potential clinical discoveries. This approach can be replicated across clinical disciplines and could exist within electronic medical records systems to automatically identify outliers within clinical notes to clinical experts.
Keywords: augmented intelligence; clinical discovery; clinical trials; hdp; hypertensive disorders of pregnancy; preeclampsia treatment; preeclampsia-eclampsia; real-world data; research methods and design.
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