Artificial intelligence (AI) in biomedical research: discussion on authors’ declaration of AI in their articles title

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its different approaches, from machine learning to deep learning, are not new. We discuss here about the declaration of AI in the title of those articles dealing with AI. From 1990 to 2021, while AI articles in the PubMed increased from 300 to 59,596, the percentage declaring AI in the title describes a U-like-shaped curve: about 30% in early 1990s, less than 13% in 2005–2014, again 30% in 2020–2021. A similar trend was observed for AI in medical imaging. While the initial decline could be due to the establishment of AI methods, the recent increase could be related to the capacity of AI to outperform humans, especially in image recognition, fuelled by the adoption of graphic processing units for general purpose computing. The recent increase may also be due to the relevance of open issues about AI, including the standardisation of methods, explainability of results, and concerns about AI-induced epoch-making transformations: to say “We are using AI” in the title may also reflect these concerns.