Health Care AI Systems Are Biased

Description

Summary

• Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, computer systems can now diagnose skin cancer like a dermatologist would, pick out a stroke on a CT scan like a radiologist, and even detect potential cancers on a colonoscopy like a gastroenterologist.
• For example, algorithms trained with gender-imbalanced data do worse at reading chest x-rays for an underrepresented gender, and researchers are already concerned that skin-cancer detection algorithms, many of which are trained primarily on light-skinned individuals, do worse at detecting skin cancer affecting darker skin.
• Doc, why is it that we can see a specific car in a moving convoy on the other side of the world, but we can’t see my CT scan from the hospital across the street?” The public has become deeply skeptical of any attempt to aggregate personal data, even for a worthy purpose.