Harvard University & MIT: Artificial intelligence predicts patients’ race from their medical images scare

Even researchers from a technical & engineering university like the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard University seem obsessed and radicalized with racism ideology! 

Very troubling!

What we are witnessing here and so often now in public discourse borders on the neurotic! The researchers appear almost to be haunted and panicked instead of remaining rational, cool, calm, and collected and to investigate the issue further as you would expect from scientists.

Did AI also contradict the self reported race? Just a thought! It appears, the authors of the Lancet paper below did not even raise this obvious question.

"The miseducation [???] of algorithms is a critical problem; when artificial intelligence mirrors unconscious thoughts, racism, and biases of the humans who generated these algorithms, it can lead to serious harm. ..."

From the abstract:

"... In our study, we show that standard AI deep learning models can be trained to predict race from medical images with high performance across multiple imaging modalities, which was sustained under external validation conditions ... We also showed that this detection is not due to proxies or imaging-related surrogate covariates for race (eg, performance of possible confounders: body-mass index [AUC 0·55], disease distribution [0·61], and breast density [0·61]). Finally, we provide evidence to show that the ability of AI deep learning models persisted over all anatomical regions and frequency spectrums of the images, suggesting the efforts to control this behaviour when it is undesirable will be challenging and demand further study.

Interpretation

The results from our study emphasise that the ability of AI deep learning models to predict self-reported race is itself not the issue of importance. However, our finding that AI can accurately predict self-reported race, even from corrupted, cropped, and noised medical images, often when clinical experts cannot, creates an enormous risk for all model deployments in medical imaging."

Artificial intelligence predicts patients’ race from their medical images | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Study shows AI can identify self-reported race from medical images that contain no indications of race detectable by human experts.

AI recognition of patient race in medical imaging: a modelling study