Data Set Terminology of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: A Historical Review and Recommendation

Medicine and artificial intelligence (AI) engineering represent two distinct fields each with decades of published history. With such history comes a set of terminology that has a specific way in which it is applied. However, when two distinct fields with overlapping terminology start to collaborate, miscommunication and misunderstandings can occur. This narrative review aims to give historical context for these terms, accentuate the importance of clarity when these terms are used in medical AI contexts, and offer solutions to mitigate misunderstandings by readers from either field. Through an examination of historical documents, including articles, writing guidelines, and textbooks, this review traces the divergent evolution of terms for data sets and their impact. Initially, the discordant interpretations of the word 'validation' in medical and AI contexts are explored. Then the data sets used for AI evaluation are classified, namely random splitting, cross-validation, temporal, geographic, internal, and external sets. The accurate and standardized description of these data sets is crucial for demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of AI applications in medicine. This review clarifies existing literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of these classifications and their implications in AI evaluation. This review then identifies often misunderstood terms and proposes pragmatic solutions to mitigate terminological confusion. Among these solutions are the use of standardized terminology such as 'training set,' 'validation (or tuning) set,' and 'test set,' and explicit definition of data set splitting terminologies in each medical AI research publication. This review aspires to enhance the precision of communication in medical AI, thereby fostering more effective and transparent research methodologies in this interdisciplinary field.