Collection 

Evaluating the Real-World Clinical Performance of AI

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Open
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As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform healthcare, its shift from controlled research environments to real-world clinical settings presents both immense promise and critical challenges. This collection in npj Digital Medicine showcases cutting-edge research that rigorously examines how AI systems perform in diverse, dynamic, and often unpredictable clinical contexts.

We invite contributions that explore the following areas:

  • Clinical utility: Demonstrating how AI tools enhance diagnostic accuracy, inform treatment decisions, and improve patient outcomes in prospective or retrospective evaluations
  • Safety and reliability: Assessing risks, unintended consequences, and robustness of AI systems in real-world deployment
  • Equity and fairness: Evaluating performance across diverse populations to uncover and mitigate algorithmic bias
  • Scalability and generalizability: Understanding how AI systems adapt across institutions, specialities, and care settings
  • Workflow integration: Investigating how AI fits into clinical processes, team dynamics, and decision-making, and understanding barriers and facilitators to AI adoption in clinical workflows.
  • Post-deployment monitoring and evaluation: Including model updating, performance decay, feedback loops, audits, prospective trials, and longitudinal studies of AI in practice over time
  • Transparency and reproducibility: Promoting open methods, interpretable models, and replicable results to foster trust and accountability
  • Patient-centered outcomes: Measuring impact of AI on care quality, experience, and health equity
  • Human factors and clinician-AI interaction: including trust, interpretability, and decision support dynamics.

By spotlighting real-world evidence, this collection aims to bridge the gap between algorithmic innovation and clinical impact—ensuring that AI technologies not only work in theory but truly deliver value in clinical practice.

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Editors

The Collection will publish original research Articles, Reviews, Perspectives and Comments (full details on content types can be found here. Papers will be published in npj digital medicine as soon as they are accepted and then collected together and promoted on the Collection homepage. All Guest Edited Collections are associated with a call for papers and are managed by one or more of our Editorial Board Members and the journal's Editors.

This Collection welcomes submissions from all authors – and not by invitation only – on the condition that the manuscripts fall within the scope of the Collection and of npj digital medicine more generally. See our editorial process page for more details. 

All submissions are subject to the same peer review process and editorial standards as regular npj digital medicine articles, including the journal’s policy on competing interests. The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions, which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.  See our Collections guidelines for more details. 

This Collection is not supported by sponsorship.