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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#291

Post by oh_sigh »

mcguire wrote: post #285
oh_sigh wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, With all due respect, I don't believe you're being honest here. And that goes to my point about people wanting race to not be a social construct. I believe you're lying to yourself(or just lying to me) that you wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case. > But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be re…

Ok, so race is real. What races are there? Is Irish a race? How, in fact, do you meaningfully define a race such that there aren't 20 races in sub-Saharan Africa for every one everywhere else? And then, what do you do with that information? I'm Irish, she is Southeast Asian, Ted over there is Mayan-German. Does it improve life in any significant way? If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy…

You're right. Thinking is too hard and scary, let's go shopping!

Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective, leading to an overall improvement in health outcomes. I'm not going to waste my sickle cell anemia test kits on testing Icelandic people.

Do you apply this same logic to people who study esoteric branches of mathematics with no real possibility of improving life in any significant way?

This all goes to my point that you don't want race to be real, so you argue that race is not real. Maybe it is convincing for you, but it is absolutely meaningless to me. It would be great if the universe worked that way though, all we would need to do is close our eyes and pretend cancer doesn't exist, and it would just go away!

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#292

Post by roflc0ptic »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #36
roflc0ptic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a scientific bent who is of the left, I always find it incredibly frustrating when people say “x is a social construct”, because it’s technically true, but also utterly elides the dual nature of the category. Race is a social construct that can be used to infer true things (probabilities) about the real world! Other social constructs that have this property: sociology, economics, physics… This isn’t t…

It's a deepity, ie. a statement with two interpretations, one true but trivial, and one enormously impactful but false.

that is a wonderful word, thanks

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#293

Post by roflc0ptic »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #292
FeepingCreature wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deepity, ie. a statement with two interpretations, one true but trivial, and one enormously impactful but false.

that is a wonderful word, thanks

also, i miss reading your comments on SSC, are you on ASX?

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#294

Post by nomel »

goatlover wrote: post #111
phkahler wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

I would say this is an observation that the labeling isn't nearly granular enough in those very large regions. From my experience, people from those regions will use much finer labels, to describe people, than the "this side of the planet" labels of "Asia" and "Africa".

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#295

Post by nomel »

kiliancs wrote: post #134
btbuildem wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin This made me chuckle. But it is a good example. I bet there is a lot we can infer from people based on their common go-to colors for clothing.

I never realized how odd the concept of "blue jeans" were until I travelled outside the US.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#296

Post by _8j50 »

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 problem is the question itself, both the one you asked and the one the researchers asked. Is it recognizing ethnicity or race? Clumping ethnicities as "race" is the social construct. It's not just skin that is different between people. If a certain culture prizes certain features in people, people with those traits will breed more, thus amplifying biological features within a socio-cultural group.

My question is, using medical imaging can it particularly identify say people of african origin but it cannot tell apart east vs west africans? Can it uniquely identify asians but can it not tell apart an indian person from a Korean? Or given proper training can it discern between north and south koreans or between a french person and a greek person?

Race is a social construct not because groups of people are all identical but because both science and major-religion have concluded that humans share a common human(homosapien) ancestry, therefore there is one human race and multiple ethnicities and geographical super-ethnicities (south east asian and north european for example).

Edit: This is also why race on id cards is silly. Not because you don't want to identify people based on appearance but because ethnicity is more granular and leads to less confusion. Would it be more identifying to say indian or asian? African or north-african?

I strongly believe the modern black/white/asian "race" is a darwinian invention to try and understand and classify nature better, based on intuition instead of science.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#297

Post by casefields »

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…

Lots of great replies but missing the most important from a scholarly journal:

Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ3bwqXZT2m8MI2egSRA...

Side note: If you've seen Ken Burn's docs then you've probably seen her before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_J._Fields

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#298

Post by mistermann »

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.

I am thinking mostly with respect to African Americans...when people talk about "racism", rarely do I see anyone distinguish between biology and culture, on either "side" of the issue...which I suspect is a huge contributor to the lack of progress on the issue.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#299

Post by tpm »

zepto wrote: post #275
tpm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if race has biological basis and also if race is inherited, there is no way around a genetic basis. Also there is a more than hundred year history of scientific research and no genetic (or other) grounding for race has been found. So yes, that is the source of my bias.

> Well if race has biological basis and also if race is inherited, there is no way around a genetic basis. False. Diet and behavior affect biology amongst other things. > Also there is a more than hundred year history of scientific research and no genetic (or other) grounding for race has been found. We didn’t have machine learning or big data 100 years ago.

> False. Diet and behavior affect biology amongst other things.

Yeah, so if a South-Asian orphan is adopted into a Swedish family, he magically ceases to be of whatever race were his parents and becomes white. That's... not how the concept of human race works.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#300

Post by 0-_-0 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #139
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…

As an additional comment on this point: The fact that trained neural networks cannot tell us why they give an answer and the best tool we have to explore that is to wiggle the inputs and see how the black box responds is a major concern for the whole space. Figuring out how to tag data with enough information to generate a "why" was an active area of research ten years ago and still is.

Can you explain to me how you recognize your mother's voice?
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