Despite the high prevalence of erectile dysfunction, patients are reluctant to seek medical advice, which leads to low diagnostic rates in clinical practice. Artificial intelligence has been widely applied in the diagnosis of many diseases and may alleviate the situation. However, the applications of artificial intelligence in erectile dysfunction have not been reviewed to date. Therefore, the assistance from artificial intelligence needs to be summarized. In this review, 418 publications before January 10, 2021, regarding artificial intelligence applications in diagnosing and predicting erectile dysfunction, were retrieved from five databases, including PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, and two Chinese databases (WANFANG and CNKI). In addition, the reference lists of the included studies or relevant reviews were checked to avoid bias. Finally, 30 articles were reviewed to summarize the current status, merits, and limitations of applying artificial intelligence in diagnosing and predicting erectile dysfunction. The results showed that artificial intelligence contributed to developing novel diagnostic questionnaires, equipment, expert systems, classifiers by images and predictive models. However, most of the included studies were not subjected to external validations, resulting in doubt on the generalizability. In the future, more rigorously designed studies with high-quality datasets for erectile dysfunction are required.
International journal of impotence research. 2022 Jan 13 [Epub ahead of print]
Yang Xiong, Yangchang Zhang, Fuxun Zhang, Changjing Wu, Feng Qin, Jiuhong Yuan
Andrology Laboratory, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China., Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics, School of Public Health and Management, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China., Andrology Laboratory, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China. .