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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

explainthispaper.com

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#41

Post by JasonFruit »

torben-friis wrote: post #21
throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

Race in the context of physical differences does not map to the social concepts of race. For example, US documents usually include Latino as a possible race, even though Latin Americans are white, black, indigenous Americans, or a mix - and Spaniards are what usually would be classified as white. If you check older forms you'd see Italians and Irish people categorized as a different (non white) category, etc.

Do US documents do that? In my recollection, you're usually asked to specify a race, and then "Latino" is included in a separate ethnicity question.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#42

Post by FeepingCreature »

cubano wrote: post #31
ceejayoz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily bad, if it's actually working. The fact that it works on an 8x8 massively pixelated version of the x-ray points to the possibility that it's not actually working, which would be bad if you based patient treatment decisions on an training set that was actually teaching the AI something else entirely.

Huh? What do you mean, not working? That the AI was randomly choosing the correct race 82% of the time by luck? I'm confused by what your implying because it would seem to me that the authors went through many steps to try to pinpoint how the AI was doing this identification and how baffling it was to everyone that even with a lot of x-ray information removed (8x8 pixels compared to say 4k), it somehow was still corr…

I think the idea is that it's picking up on a coincidental correlational bias in the source data.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#43

Post by notahacker »

dahfizz wrote: post #25
happytoexplain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, some anatomical differences are certainly affected by environment, but the quoted phrase is typically used in the context of treating races differently based on behavior ("X people are immoral", "Y people are stupid"). It's meant to encourage people to treat each other with equity and consider that such observed differences may be distorted by news, your like-minded cohorts, sociological conditions, etc, which a…

> since clearly the idea that races have anatomical differences is not contested by anybody This is not true. I had a college professor explain the "race is a social construct" idea, and her position was staunchly that there was _no_ biological basis for race. See also this article by the scientific american[1]: > Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological mean…

There is a massive difference between there being a biological basis to some of the phenotypes associated with racial categories and there being "biological meaning" to identifying races.

"Black" represents a wide range of genotypes, many which differ more from each other than from "white" individuals and populations, even if there may be other tendencies like bone density and novel genetic features that appear more commonly or exclusively in some subsets of the "black" population. The skin colour phenotype being (usually) darker just happens to be very easy to notice and have acquired a lot of socially constructed meaning. Except in the narrow context of skin tones, it isn't biologically meaningful to consider "black" people as a particular group though, particularly not compared to more specific genetic markers that don't have the same socially constructed meaning...

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#44

Post by jollybean »

sillyquiet wrote: post #28
throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

IMO it's because it's very dubious the AI is doing what the paper is maintaining it's doing. People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Every individual has a set of biological features inherited from their ancestors which, theoretically, could include any or all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavil…

That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically.

'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence.

(Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do from the first pictures they have of us, not an 'Enlightened Alien' scientific form of categorization).

If all they had were 'pictures' of us, the race categories we use would be the obvious grouping, or something resembling that.

They would see that most of the people in Sub Saharan Africa looked quite different from those in East Asia. (And difference between Sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians is more than 'melanin').

There's a 'continuum' between every biological grouping, that doesn't mean those categories don't exist. It just means we're going to argue a lot about where and how to draw the lines.

Race as a 'Social Construct' relates to all of the other attributes that we associate with race, and individual lived experiences due to how they are perceived etc..

To your point, Aliens wouldn't immediately pick up on the 'Social Construct' bit, at least not right away and so they wouldn't have the prejudices that we do, but if they could only observe from afar, they would see exactly what we see, and visual distinctions would be the 'first order of separation' even if it was, after further understanding (i.e. genetics) a less important distinction as you hint.

Edit: someone provided this like I'd like to also include it [1] which illustrates some of the current debate over the notion of race, and that it's clearly politicized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#45

Post by retrac »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

Race, of course, is based on physical traits. But the groupings and boundaries are culturally determined and very arbitrary. Minor nose and cheek shape differences are obvious to the Hutu and Tutsi (enough they massacred each on the premise they are different racial groups) but to the average American they're both just black. Similarly, a century ago, it was entirely obvious to the British and the Italians that they were different races of people, although closely related. Today that idea is completely alien in America, where they're both white.

Perhaps the best example is the American views on what defines blackness. Because I grew up in a community where mixed race white/black was seen as a distinct race from white or black, I have a very hard time interpreting race the way Americans do sometimes -- Barrack Obama and Kamala Harris's mixed parentage is obvious to me, which makes them obviously not black to me (think like in the same way Obama is obviously not white) and I have a hard time wrapping my head around Americans seeing them as such, but apparently they do, since even a small amount of physical traits that suggest recent African descent categorizes you as black there.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#46

Post by anotheraccount9 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

Because race is not a social construct.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#47

Post by foldr »

dahfizz wrote: post #25
happytoexplain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, some anatomical differences are certainly affected by environment, but the quoted phrase is typically used in the context of treating races differently based on behavior ("X people are immoral", "Y people are stupid"). It's meant to encourage people to treat each other with equity and consider that such observed differences may be distorted by news, your like-minded cohorts, sociological conditions, etc, which a…

> since clearly the idea that races have anatomical differences is not contested by anybody This is not true. I had a college professor explain the "race is a social construct" idea, and her position was staunchly that there was _no_ biological basis for race. See also this article by the scientific american[1]: > Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological mean…

The point of the article is that if you clustered people based on genetic or anatomical properties in a non-post-hoc way, you would not end up with the same system of racial categories that are commonly used in the USA (or indeed any other country). As another poster has pointed out, the most striking example of this is the category 'Latino', which while often treated as a 'racial' category obviously has no biological basis.

This does not entail that no biological traits are correlated with race – biological traits are correlated to varying degrees with all kinds of subgroups of people. It does, however, mean that racial categories have no scientific basis.

To expand on this, imagine a Martian scientist studying human biology in isolation from human culture. Such a scientist would not subdivide humans into groups that match common racial categories, as these groupings are arbitrary from a biological point of view.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#48

Post by JulianMorrison »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #14

Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? Is the idea that black people have greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it’s worth, I’m a staunch egalitarian and I don’t see that changing eithe…

How race is a social construct: it was imposed as an idea for reasons that were not connected to physiological fact (although often claiming the contrary at the time, the claims were the same kind of made up BS as phrenology, another idea from the same time period).

There are biological correlations with inherited genetic lineage. That only has weak correlation with assigned race. Lots of different lineages of people are "black", Africa is big and diverse. Lots of different lineages of people are "white". But for example, if your lineage is from a malarial region, your chances of being a genetic sickle cell carrier are higher. Most people from those areas are dark skinned, so it correlates with being "black".

Also there's the impact of racism, which affects everything from nutrition to poverty to pollution exposure, and does so on an individual, a regional, and a national scale. And this has biological consequences.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#50

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

OneEyedRobot wrote: post #34
ChrisLovejoy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there must be some confounder here - like the positioning used for the CXRs correlating with race, based on the methodology used in a particular region / hospital. Seems the most likely explanation for it still working even when pixellated as 8x8?

That was exactly my thinking. I wouldn't publish anything until the pixellated versions were better understood.

Well, isn’t the point of publishing to get help figuring it out from other researchers in the field? I agree it’s very likely that there’s some kind of explainable trick the AI is using, but there’s no guarantee it’s an easy trick that the authors could have figured out.
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