The study, led by researchers in Argentina, focused on artificial intelligence’s ability to analyze chest images to find 14 medical conditions, including pneumonia and heart enlargement. The researchers examined three open-source algorithms widely used in experimental medical research.
The researchers found that algorithms performed worse on patients whose sex was underrepresented in the training data. Their results highlight how critical it is for AI researchers to use training data that represents the characteristics of all the patients on whom the model will be tested.
“It’s such a valuable cautionary tale about how bias gets into algorithms. The combination of their results, with the fact that the datasets that these algorithms are trained on often don’t pay attention to these measures of diversity, feels really important,” said Ziad Obermeyer, MD, a machine learning researcher.
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