Automatic Classification of Medical Artificial Intelligence Articles by Their Level of Translational Maturity: An Interpretable Supervised Text-Classification Approach

The rapid expansion of the medical artificial intelligence (AI) literature has outpaced our ability to judge how far published models have progressed towards clinical use. We investigated whether the translational maturity of a study can be estimated automatically from its abstract. Using PubMed, we assembled a corpus of 11,024 candidate articles, reduced it to 1,816 AI-related articles by heuristic filtering, and manually double-annotated a balanced sample of 524 articles across five maturity classes (internal validation, external validation, prospective evaluation, implementation or governance, and not applicable). Abstracts were represented as TF-IDF features and classified using multinomial logistic regression with a Lasso penalty, chosen for interpretability and suitability for a small, imbalanced dataset. On a stratified held-out test set (n = 104), the model achieved 69.2% accuracy, Cohen’s kappa of 0.495, macro-F1 of 0.458 and a weighted AUC of 0.820. Performance was strong for the frequent classes but poor for the rare implementation or governance class, which the model failed to recover. A balanced manual verification of 200 large-corpus predictions confirmed this pattern, with per-class precision ranging from 82.5% (internal validation) to 5.0% (implementation or governance). An interpretable, low-resource classifier can support literature mapping but requires human oversight for advanced maturity levels.