In order to conduct a robust clinical validation, the investigators have designed a study on the required sample size. The study is design to evaluate the role of an AI-assisted tool as a support for improving the daily clinical work. The investigators used an online website (https://statulator.com/SampleSize/ss2PP.html) for the calculation and use the "paired binary proportions" option. Using the case of prostate cancer, the investigators want to compare the probability of correct risk classification in prostate cancer by clinicians alone and/or guided by AI. The study will have a significance (α) = 0.05; power (β) = 80%; the analysis will be "two sided" and with equal group sizes.
An 10% improvement in cancer risk classification was observed when clinicians had access to an AI tool solution (Yilmaz et al.,). In addition, the authors reported that expert readers had an accuracy rate of 81% compared to 69% for novice readers when determining the Gleason score of lesions (a medical term used in pathology to classify the aggressiveness of cells in a tumour). The authors also assumed an 80% correlation between paired observations.
As a result, at least 60 new cases would be needed to evaluate the performance of the AI tool.