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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

explainthispaper.com

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#111

Post by goatlover »

phkahler wrote: post #97
sillyquiet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in…

So you're saying there is an Asian race spanning 4.5 billion people from China to India to Iran and there are also German and Irish races. I guess the question is how can Germans and Irish be different races, but Chinese, Indians and Iranians are the same race?

Africa is going to be similarly diverse as Asia.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#112

Post by hgial »

abrichr wrote: post #2

Previous submission of the paper itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050699 We know that various features visible in medical images correlate with race, eg breast density, bone density, etc. Most likely the network is just learning a classifier on top of these features. This is trivially verifiable but conspicuously absent from the paper.

It's not "conspicuously absent from the paper". They have a whole group of experiments on this: "Experiments on anatomic and phenotype confounders" and conclude "Race detection is not due to obvious anatomic and phenotype confounder variables."

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#113

Post by benjaminjackman »

btbuildem wrote: post #103
sillyquiet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin, but let's not pretend that such an obvious visual variation as skin tone would be overlooked. White cat, tabby cat, grey cat, etc? We don't try to say one sort of cat is better than other, but we can tell them apart very well. Maybe what you're saying is that the aliens would not have the same prejudices associated with that mark…

Supposing there are Aliens FWIW I don’t know that they would perceive the same visible spectrum that we do, which might effect their ability to differentiate by color. And they might not even perceive colors at all perhaps focusing on patterns or perhaps use some sort acoustical sonar system of high pitched shrieks or an electrocapacitive perception captured by elongated dactyltennae hands with which they can sense the world around them.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#114

Post by abrichr »

hgial wrote: post #112
abrichr wrote: post #2

Previous submission of the paper itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050699 We know that various features visible in medical images correlate with race, eg breast density, bone density, etc. Most likely the network is just learning a classifier on top of these features. This is trivially verifiable but conspicuously absent from the paper.

It's not "conspicuously absent from the paper". They have a whole group of experiments on this: "Experiments on anatomic and phenotype confounders" and conclude "Race detection is not due to obvious anatomic and phenotype confounder variables."

They show correlation with individual features, not all together.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#115

Post by goatlover »

OneEyedRobot wrote: post #67
mistermann wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider it from the perspective that race and culture are typically conflated into just race, then "race is a social construct" is fairly logical.

>If you consider it from the perspective that race and culture are typically conflated into just race... I'd say that that only occurs in the odd case of 'Latino'. For some reason Spanish-speaking got amalgamated into a thing it didn't belong.

It happens for Europeans too. White has come to mean everyone of European descent, even though there's tons of ethnic, historical and regional differences across the continent. Asia even more so. Africa is also very diverse when you take into account Northern Africa. The whole Mediterranean area had lots of groups moving around for thousands of years across three continents.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#116

Post by runako »

jcims wrote: post #91
ceejayoz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that an AI model might be able to glean race on a probabilistic basis from x-rays. This specific model's ability to do it from a 64 pixel version of said x-ray makes me skeptical it's doing so successfully.

What if it was an 8x8 grayscale photo of their face? We wouldn't be particularly surprised that it can guess race. The fact that we struggle to detect patterns in the data doesn't mean they don't exist.

This is actually pretty funny. In much of the American Deep South, even Americans from other parts of the country can't identify race reliably when sitting next to a person.

The notion that a classifier can reliably identify race based on an 8x8 grayscale is risible.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#117

Post by throwaway894345 »

542458 wrote: post #27
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…

You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by the volume of replies! The other replies here are mostly good, but I'd also like to note that "race is a social construct" refers to how "races" aren't really objective categories (What defines if somebody is "white"?) and more of a subjective thing, particularly at the margins. We can build classifiers that can match most people's (in our current cultur…

> You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by the volume of replies!

Agreed, and upvotes too! It seems like I've struck upon something people have been interested in talking about.

> The other replies here are mostly good, but I'd also like to note that "race is a social construct" refers to how "races" aren't really objective categories (What defines if somebody is "white"?) and more of a subjective thing, particularly at the margins. We can build classifiers that can match most people's (in our current cultural context) perceptions most of the time, but that doesn't make it a rigid natural phenomenon.

I certainly believe this to be the case, but when I hear "race is a social construct" it's almost always in the context of denying biological differences between the races in the same way that some extreme (though mainstream and influential) people take "gender is a social construct" to mean that literally all differences between the sexes are socially constructed including height, weight, strength, etc (otherwise known as "blank slatism").

That said, unlike biological sex, there are fewer valid social implications that we can draw from race (e.g., there are a bunch of social implications which fall out from women's unique ability to bear children, but no analogues which fall out from race) and we have drawn many false implications from race which have been tremendously harmful to individuals of different races, so if we have to reduce everything to a slogan or a binary (as our simplistic society increasingly demands), then "race is a social construct" isn't a bad one.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#118

Post by throwaway894345 »

soundnote wrote: post #98
iSnow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature does not create "bins" to sort people or things. Some traits are clustered and we latch on the most visible clusters to define "races". In reality, there is broad overlap and if you look up close, the whole concept becomes hairy. Someone with a father of Scandinavian descent and a mother with African lineage, what is that person, black, white, 50/50? It's the same with gender/sex. While the biological substrat…

Not quite: Sex is very clearly split into two distinct mechanisms. There's definitely sex-linked distributions of different traits, like male and female typical ranges of height, or agreeable personality, risk-seeking/risk aversion and so on, where both sexes operate the same mechanism. Races are mostly clusters in variation within one mechanism - eg. skin color is largely a gradient of more or less melanin, and what…

To advance your point, the ability to bear children is kind of the definitional distinction from which all of these biological distinctions derive as well as tons of social distinctions. Race has no such analogue.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#119

Post by goatlover »

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.

There's one species of humans still around. Race is a non-scientific category that got made up a few centuries ago, and has continually changed over that time. Ethnicity is the regional and cultural group of usually related people that everyone prior to western colonization understood as separate groups. Often you could assimilate into a different ethnicity.

So Romans would have understand themselves to be different from Greeks, Persians, Egyptians and Jews.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#120

Post by sillyquiet »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #109
packetlost wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that…

I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label th…

Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.
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