Background Machine learning (ML) has captured the attention of many clinicians who may not have formal training in this area but are otherwise increasingly exposed to ML literature that may be relevant to their clinical specialties. ML papers that follow an outcomes-based research format can be assessed using clinical research appraisal frameworks such as PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome). However, the PICO frameworks strain when applied to ML papers that create new ML models, which are akin to diagnostic tests. There is a need for a new framework to help assess such papers. Objective We propose a new framework to help clinicians systematically read and evaluate medical ML papers whose aim is to create a new ML model: ML-PICO (Machine Learning, Population, Identification, Crosscheck, Outcomes).

A few days ago, I have read a post on LinkedIn showing that the number of Machine Learning (ML) papers has been increasing very quickly over the last few years to about 100 ML papers per day (on Arxiv, a popular public repository of research papers). That is about 33,000 papers per year. This shows the excitement about the new advances in that field in particular with respect to deep learning that has lead to obtaining good results for various applications. Some people on LinkedIn wondered if there are too many ML papers and how they could keep up with advances in that field. I will make a few comments about this.