AI Systems Can Detect Patient Race, Creating New Opportunities to Perpetuate Health Disparities

upstart writes:

AI systems can detect patient race, creating new opportunities to perpetuate health disparities:

Can computers figure out your race by looking at your wrist bones or lungs? Yes, according to a study published this month by the prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet Digital Health. That's not the whole story, though: the bigger issue is researchers don't know how the machines do it.

The findings come after months of work by a team of experts in radiology and computer science led by Judy W. Gichoya, MD, assistant professor and director of the Healthcare Innovations and Translational Informatics Lab in Emory University School of Medicine's Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences. Additional Emory researchers include Hari Trivedi, MD, assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences, Ananth Bhimireddy, MS, systems software engineer and computer science student Zachary Zaiman. The team also includes colleagues from Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, Indiana University-Perdue University and Arizona State, plus experts in Canada, Taiwan and Australia.

The team used large-scale medical imaging datasets from both public and private sources, datasets with thousands of chest x-rays, chest CT scans, mammograms, hand x-rays and spinal x-rays from racially diverse patient populations.

They found that standard deep learning models-computer models developed to help speed the task of reading and detecting things like fractures in bones and pneumonia in lungs-could predict with startling accuracy the self-reported race of a patient from a radiologic image, despite the image having no patient information associated with it.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.