Machine learning has become a key driver of the digital health revolution. That comes with a fair share of high hopes and hype. We conducted a scoping review on machine learning in medical imaging, providing a comprehensive outlook of the field's potential, limitations, and future directions. Most reported strengths and promises included: improved (a) analytic power, (b) efficiency (c) decision making, and (d) equity. Most reported challenges included: (a) structural barriers and imaging heterogeneity, (b) scarcity of well-annotated, representative and interconnected imaging datasets (c) validity and performance limitations, including bias and equity issues, and (d) the still missing clinical integration. The boundaries between strengths and challenges, with cross-cutting ethical and regulatory implications, remain blurred. The literature emphasizes explainability and trustworthiness, with a largely missing discussion about the specific technical and regulatory challenges surrounding these concepts. Future trends are expected to shift towards multi-source models, combining imaging with an array of other data, in a more open access, and explainable manner.
Copyright: © 2023 Nittas et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.