Today's AI systems for medical decision support often succeed on benchmark
datasets in research papers but fail in real-world deployment. This work
focuses on the decision making of sepsis, an acute life-threatening systematic
infection that requires an early diagnosis with high uncertainty from the
clinician. Our aim is to explore the design requirements for AI systems that
can support clinical experts in making better decisions for the early diagnosis
of sepsis. The study begins with a formative study investigating why clinical
experts abandon an existing AI-powered Sepsis predictive module in their
electrical health record (EHR) system. We argue that a human-centered AI system
needs to support human experts in the intermediate stages of a medical
decision-making process (e.g., generating hypotheses or gathering data),
instead of focusing only on the final decision. Therefore, we build SepsisLab
based on a state-of-the-art AI algorithm and extend it to predict the future
projection of sepsis development, visualize the prediction uncertainty, and
propose actionable suggestions (i.e., which additional laboratory tests can be
collected) to reduce such uncertainty. Through heuristic evaluation with six
clinicians using our prototype system, we demonstrate that SepsisLab enables a
promising human-AI collaboration paradigm for the future of AI-assisted sepsis
diagnosis and other high-stakes medical decision making.Comment: Under submission to CHI202