ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Boosting medical diagnostics by pooling independent judgments.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 76 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
76 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 201 citations in OpenAlex.
- ACCORD (ACcurate COnsensus Reporting Document): A reporting guideline for consensus methods in biomedicine developed via a modified Delphi.PLoS medicine · 2024Guideline
- Renal denervation for hypertension management in the UK: a Delphi expert consensus.Heart (British Cardiac Society) · 2026Article
- Collective problem decomposition improves the wisdom of deliberative crowds.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A Delphi consensus for implementing genomic testing in unresectable or metastatic urothelial cancer.BJU international · 2026Article
- Developing a consensus research definition for profound autism using a modified Delphi method.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Own and others' confidence in social information use.iScience · 2026Article
- CalDiff: Calibrating Uncertainty and Accessing Reliability of Diffusion Models for Trustworthy Lesion Segmentation.IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics · 2026Article
- Human pairs show collective benefit in olfactory perception despite individual differences and verbal limits.iScience · 2026Article
- Establishing Expert Consensus on a Unified Decision Framework for Retina Patient Care.Ophthalmology and therapy · 2026Article
- A recipe for dyadic collective intelligence for well-structured tasks: mix equal parts cognitive ability and confidence plus a pinch of social sensitivity.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Subjective Confidence as a Monitor of the Replicability of the Response.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Human-AI collectives most accurately diagnose clinical vignettes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Echocardiography reporting in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction: Delphi consensus study.Open heart · 2025Article
- Enhancing skin lesion classification: a CNN approach with human baseline comparison.PeerJ. Computer science · 2025Article
- Information-Theoretic Measures of Metacognition: Bounds and Relation to Group Performance.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- The optimal system of care for the management of delayed sleep onset in adult ADHD in the UK: a modified Delphi consensus.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Appraisal of current surgical guidelines for inflammatory bowel disease using the AGREE-S instrument: A scoping review.Colorectal disease : the official journal of the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland · 2024Article
- Article
- Inconsistencies in rater-based assessments mainly affect borderline candidates: but using simple heuristics might improve pass-fail decisions.Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice · 2024Article
- Blinding to Circumvent Human Biases: Deliberate Ignorance in Humans, Institutions, and Machines.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
16 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Collective intelligence refers to the ability of groups to outperform individual decision makers when solving complex cognitive problems. Despite its potential to revolutionize decision making in a wide range of domains, including medical, economic, and political decision making, at present, little is known about the conditions underlying collective intelligence in real-world contexts. We here focus on two key areas of medical diagnostics, breast and skin cancer detection. Using a simulation study that draws on large real-world datasets, involving more than 140 doctors making more than 20,000 diagnoses, we investigate when combining the independent judgments of multiple doctors outperforms the best doctor in a group. We find that similarity in diagnostic accuracy is a key condition for collective intelligence: Aggregating the independent judgments of doctors outperforms the best doctor in a group whenever the diagnostic accuracy of doctors is relatively similar, but not when doctors' diagnostic accuracy differs too much. This intriguingly simple result is highly robust and holds across different group sizes, performance levels of the best doctor, and collective intelligence rules. The enabling role of similarity, in turn, is explained by its systematic effects on the number of correct and incorrect decisions of the best doctor that are overruled by the collective. By identifying a key factor underlying collective intelligence in two important real-world contexts, our findings pave the way for innovative and more effective approaches to complex real-world decision making, and to the scientific analyses of those approaches.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.