A Causal Inference Approach for Evaluating Diagnostic Tests and AI-Enabled Medical Devices: From Effect Modification to Information-Augmented Decision-Making

Abstract

Diagnostic medical tests and devices provide useful information for evaluating the potential benefits and risks of therapeutic treatments. However, unlike treatments, their impact on health outcomes is generally indirect because measuring diagnostic information typically does not itself affect patient outcomes, which complicates evaluation of their effectiveness. In this work, we develop a causal inference approach for evaluating diagnostic tests by distinguishing explanatory and pragmatic effectiveness. Explanatory effectiveness evaluates whether a diagnostic test result provides treatment-relevant information beyond baseline covariates by explaining additional treatment-effect heterogeneity, which we characterize using a variance-based treatment-effect variable importance measure. Pragmatic effectiveness evaluates whether incorporating this information into personalized treatment decisions improves expected outcomes, a question central to decision-making for patients, clinicians, and other health care stakeholders. We formalize pragmatic effectiveness as a contrast between expected outcomes under optimal personalized treatment rules defined with and without access to the diagnostic test result. We establish identification of the proposed estimand and provide Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation (TMLE) and cross-validated TMLE procedures for nonparametric estimation and inference. Simulation studies and a synthetic colorectal cancer application illustrate the proposed estimands and estimation performance. More broadly, this approach provides a causal inference perspective for evaluating AI-enabled devices by distinguishing their dual roles as information-enrichment and personalized decision-optimization tools, clarifying whether AI improves outcomes by expanding information for downstream decisions, improving the decision rule used to act on that information, or through both pathways.