Assertiveness-based Agent Communication for a Personalized Medicine on Medical Imaging Diagnosis

Intelligent agents are showing increasing promise for clinical decision-making in a variety of healthcare settings. While a substantial body of work has contributed to the best strategies to convey these agents’ decisions to clinicians, few have considered the impact of personalizing and customizing these communications on the clinicians’ performance and receptiveness. This raises the question of how intelligent agents should adapt their tone in accordance with their target audience. We designed two approaches to communicate the decisions of an intelligent agent for breast cancer diagnosis with different tones: a suggestive (non-assertive) tone and an imposing (assertive) one. We used an intelligent agent to inform about: (1) number of detected findings; (2) cancer severity on each breast and per medical imaging modality; (3) visual scale representing severity estimates; (4) the sensitivity and specificity of the agent; and (5) clinical arguments of the patient, such as pathological co-variables. Our results demonstrate that assertiveness plays an important role in how this communication is perceived and its benefits. We show that personalizing assertiveness according to the professional experience of each clinician can reduce medical errors and increase satisfaction, bringing a novel perspective to the design of adaptive communication between intelligent agents and clinicians.