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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

explainthispaper.com

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#71

Post by OneEyedRobot »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #50
OneEyedRobot wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd warm up to that concept if the article was: "We don't know what in the hell is going on here. Here's our source code and data set of x-rays and race. What do you think?"

It could be that in the realm of machine learning, most of what is going on is people turning random knobs on a big machine and getting mysterious results. It's the birth of science without understanding.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#72

Post by iandanforth »

I asked the authors if they had compared the results with the participant's skin color. They had not. The hypothesis would be that melanin is interacting with X-rays and would explain how the system can classify "race" even at extremely degraded resolutions.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#73

Post by dexen »

dahfizz wrote: post #26
FourthProtocol wrote: post #11

There's only one race. Ethnicity may vary.

ethnicity = race race = something_else() You're just redefining words, we are all still talking about the same concepts. This is unhelpful pedantry.

"Euphemism treadmill" [1] is a real problem when medical terminology enters common circulation. Various medical terms have shifted into insult or slur territory over the years - a risky example being "mentally retarded". Note it started as a polite expression used in stead of earlier expressions that already fell victim to euphemism treadmill - and now is understood as an insult. "Handicapped" is an example that went from polite ersatz word to bordering on insulting in our lifetimes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#74

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

andrewzah wrote: post #53
IshKebab wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'. That doesn't mean race doesn't exist any more than the fact that height is a continuum doesn't mean that short people and tall people don't exist.

"That doesn't mean race doesn't exist" Exactly, although not in the traditional sense. There are many many overlapping genetic aspects in humans; We subdivide for political or social reasons, not strictly biological ones. To make the height comparison more fair, it would be as if we divided people into "bigs" or "littles" arbitrarily and formed political parties around it, etc. Height is one biological aspect and eve…

But I've think you've gotten looped around here to a stance that fails to account for the original context. It wouldn't be that surprising if an AI could categorize people into "tall" vs "short" from pixelated medical images; certainly nobody would say, as the parent comment did, that the AI must be cheating because there's no such thing as being biologically tall.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#75

Post by jollybean »

Retric wrote: post #63
jollybean wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s a social construct because the lines aren’t drawn along genetic lines. For example Americans call someone that’s 3/4th white and 1/4th black a black person. Further features that seem very important to us like the shape of our eyes or skin tone may seem irrelevant to a creature which doesn’t have a face and sees the world in a different color spectrum than we do. They might group based on smell or habitat markin…

"the lines aren’t drawn along genetic lines. "

Race is definitely drawn along genetics lines - you've just demonstrated that in your example.

The 1/4 black - 3/4 white person was not identified as 'Asian' in your example, but rather, in the mixed physical scenario was crudely categorized as one or the other, in the example you gave, Black.

(FYI I tend to disagree a bit about the category though: I believe people will be categorized mostly for how they actually look, not so much the 'ratio' of anything. There's a lot of 1/2 Filipino 1/2 White people on TikTok who 'look' 100% White and make funny videos about the fact nobody believes them about their heritage).

Your example shows that race is definitely a social construct, but that it also has underlying genetic realities.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#76

Post by andrewzah »

anotheraccount9 wrote: post #46
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.

I initially had this same belief, but I realized I had such a limited understanding of race after reading the wikipedia article on it [0]. That we divide not based on actual genetics but visible markers makes it a social construct. And the way we've chosen to look at race politically has changed over time.

"Because the variation of physical traits is clinal and nonconcordant, anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered that the more traits and the more human groups they measured, the fewer discrete differences they observed among races and the more categories they had to create to classify human beings. The number of races observed expanded to the 1930s and 1950s, and eventually anthropologists concluded that there were no discrete races.[93] Twentieth and 21st century biomedical researchers have discovered this same feature when evaluating human variation at the level of alleles and allele frequencies. Nature has not created four or five distinct, nonoverlapping genetic groups of people."

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#77

Post by eptcyka »

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…

The genetic differences between different people in Africa are far greater than the genetic differences between black and white people in North America. The term "race" as used to describe belonging to a different groups which generally experience their lives vastly differently to other groups is thus inherently social. The hypothesis goes as follows - if black and white people are so similar to each other biologically, why are their life experiences so different? It would seem that there's more to it than just the biochemical composition of our bodies that dictates what kind of a life you'll have.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#78

Post by ceejayoz »

dexen wrote: post #68
ceejayoz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That the AI was randomly choosing the correct race 82% of the time by luck? No; as with the article I linked elsewhere in the thread ( https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-fr... ), that the AI might have found some other indicator, like filenames in the data set, or metadata in the images that included patient name, or differences in the length of patient name (often redacted by black rectangle…

>the AI might have found some other indicator, like filenames in the data set The paper quite explicitly goes into testing and disseminating what exactly the AI detects. Two observations: - the classification clearly was primarily based on the visual content rather than spurious metadata, because various transformations of the visual content had the expected impact on classification correctness - the classification c…

The faster-than-light neutrino experiment similarly went "we've tried to account for everything we can think of and still can't figure it out" when they published. It turned out to be a measurement error.

The same may be true here, and I think it's the most likely explanation.

I'd be interested in whether the same model can be trained to predict patient wealth, hair color, style of clothing, religion, etc. from the same x-ray data sets.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#79

Post by zepto »

eptcyka wrote: post #77
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…

The genetic differences between different people in Africa are far greater than the genetic differences between black and white people in North America. The term "race" as used to describe belonging to a different groups which generally experience their lives vastly differently to other groups is thus inherently social. The hypothesis goes as follows - if black and white people are so similar to each other biological…

> The genetic differences between different people in Africa are far greater than the genetic differences between black and white people in North America.

This is often repeated, but the point of the question is that the OP calls this into question.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#80

Post by ceejayoz »

jollybean wrote: post #66
ceejayoz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the grouping we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. An alien taxonomist, perhaps. We humans go "bug! whale! snake! cow!" most of the time even for species found here on our own planet.

Yes, and if we were to most crudely distinguish between sub-groups of 'bugs whales and cows' we would do it first and foremost based on immediate appearance. We would even name the sub-groups firstly the artifacts that differentiate them physically. Blue Whale, Grey Whale Black Bear, Brown Bear. As we develop a better understanding, we'd also probably later determine that the genetic differences may not map very well…

I'd tend to hope a species capable of interstellar travel would have learned the same lessons already about not classifying based on mere outward appearance.

They'll presumably have had things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation happen on their own world.

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