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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#161

Post by caeril »

foldr wrote: post #123
throwaway894345 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and a host of cultural considerations (such as region of birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people this way, but it's not really an approximation to anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The only real reason to keep track of people's race is to ensure that...they're not being discrimina…

> Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits

Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements) isolated regions.

Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle fiber density, susceptibility to certain diseases, endocrine profiles, and a host of other things that very much do matter.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#162

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#163

Post by eplanit »

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.

Race is distinct from Nationality. "Latino" is not a synonym for citizens of Latin American countries, but the name of a racial group which originated from that region of the world.

It gets confusing with countries like China, Japan, and India, which are more racially homogeneous, and where the country name is the same as the (common) name of the predominate racial groups.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#164

Post by HWR_14 »

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…

From what I understand, race is a social construct doesn't mean that there can be no physical differences. After all, humans have been able to tell* what race someone is with their stupid human eyes. It's making a claim the important aspects of race are a social construct.

If the defining physical differences between races is both melanin and sternum width, that doesn't seem to be more relevant than just skin melanin.

* In many cases. It's more error prone than most people want to admit.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#165

Post by neaden »

JasonFruit wrote: post #41
torben-friis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are correct. Most people who identify as Latino/Hispanic in the US consider that to be their race though, not ethnicity. So Census data has a lot of people who identify as Race: Other Ethnicity: Hispanic/Latino.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#166

Post by vilhelm_s »

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…

In principle yes, but did you read the paper? They do a lot of completely crazy things like blurring the image until it's just fuzzy blobs, or doing a high-pass filter on it until it just looks like noise (they comment that a human could not even guess that it's an x-ray picture), and they still get very high accuracy. Basically no matter what they try they can still get the race out, with slightly lower percentage numbers. When reading it I also thought this is too good to be true, and they may have some kind of bug in their code...

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#167

Post by runako »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #146
runako wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Racial segregationists in the Americas literally had to write laws delineating races based on factors external to that individual (e.g. their parentage). That is: even people who believed in a racial hierarchy also believ…

But is this only because they lacked a theoretical understanding of genetics (including an understanding of which combinations of genes that express the features that we attribute to race, which we still presumably lack by-and-large) and sequencing technology?

> which combinations of genes that express the features that we attribute to race

If an arbitrarily large grouping of genotype combinations is necessary to categorize people, perhaps that categorization scheme is not useful? I would imagine that the number of "races" generated via the mechanism you posit would measure in the hundreds or thousands, rendering it unrelated in practice to the word "race" as it is used.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#168

Post by Cycl0ps »

ceejayoz wrote: post #10
umvi wrote: post #6

I don't see why this is necessarily bad. An ML model is picking up on subtle anatomical or physiological differences between races. So what, that doesn't automatically mean the AI is racist or biased...

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.

Since it's effectively the same anatomical structure, presented in a grayscale image, I think bone density would change the average color of the image regardless of what level of pixelation was applied. The chance of detection through some other method isn't ruled out though. It could be hitting off of something mundane like the margins on the edge of an image, how centered the torso is in frame, foreign objects in the body from procedures, any random thing that could bias the data can also lead to false positives. The only way to verify would be to use a new data set, ideally from new hospitals, and see if it has similar results.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#169

Post by foldr »

caeril wrote: post #161
foldr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and a host of cultural considerations (such as region of birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people this way, but it's not really an approximation to anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The only real reason to keep track of people's race is to ensure that...they're not being discrimina…

> Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements) isolated regions. Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle fiber…

Yes, no-one is denying that racial categories correlate to various degrees with genetic characteristics. This is blindingly obvious – unless there are some people who think that ethnically Chinese people learn to have epithantic folds from their environment?

Where people err is in assuming that these sorts of trivial observations are sufficient to show that race has a biological basis. Racial groupings are not biologically natural. They are completely arbitrary from a genetic point of view. That is, there are no sensible biological criteria according to which humans can be grouped neatly into a handful of 'races'.

See for example the following comment regarding sickle cell anemia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalem... Yes, 'black' people are statistically more susceptible, but that's not because of any property of 'black' people as a group. It's just because regions with Malaria happen to have dark skinned populations.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#170

Post by pessimizer »

heywherelogingo wrote: post #130
sillyquiet wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I am saying that skin tone would not be as important a feature. For example, lining up those dead bodies by skin tone alone would have Central Africans mixed in with South Americans, Austronesians, and South Asians, Northern Europeans mixed in with East Asians and Inuit, Southern Europeans mixed in with Indians,Central Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs, etc etc.

But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been able to identify an albino African as African?

But you're moving away from the premise of the GP.
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