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AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

explainthispaper.com

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Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#301

Post by drdeca »

ceejayoz wrote: post #271
drdeca wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The following is a response to only your first paragraph: Huh? If the distributions of bone densities among “people you would visually identify as ‘race X’ ” and “people you would visually identify as ‘race Y’ ” differ, then knowing that an individual would be someone you would visually identify as ‘race X’, gives you some amount of statistical information about their bone density. I guess you just mean that you can’…

> If the distributions of bone densities among “people you would visually identify as ‘race X’ ” and “people you would visually identify as ‘race Y’ ” differ, then knowing that an individual would be someone you would visually identify as ‘race X’, gives you some amount of statistical information about their bone density. Only if they differ substantially . If they look like https://evergreenleadership.com/wp-content…

I took the word "anything" too literally.

I interpreted "conclude anything from" as "have a different posterior probability distribution" rather than "have a significantly different posterior probability distribution". This was an error on my part.

Thanks for the elaboration.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#302

Post by mcguire »

oh_sigh wrote: post #291
mcguire wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Esoteric branches of mathematics do not have a long and ongoing history of being used to marginalize and take advantage of groups of people.

And I notice you cannot answer any of my questions as to how you would define races.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#303

Post by vladTheInhaler »

padastra wrote: post #171
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…

Blue is a color. Yellow is a color. The fact that green exists doesn’t mean those colors aren't real.

Is magenta a color? A real one? We perceive it as such, but there is no place on the electromagnetic spectrum corresponding to magenta. If you went hunting for magenta photons, you'd be hunting for quite a long while. What that says to me is that our intuitive mental construct of color isn't very reliable, even though it feels so real. Likewise, maybe we should be less trusting of our intuitive labels for other phenomena.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#304

Post by shadowgovt »

0-_-0 wrote: post #300
shadowgovt wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I cannot, but I don't understand why the question is asked. I'm not a convolutional neural network. And recognition of my mother's voice isn't going to have impact on, say, medical treatment for people of a particular race, or who gets a loan granted to them, or whether an autonomous vehicle successfully recognizes a person crossing the street, or whether a drone's auto targeting system decides that this blob of sensory input is a civilian sedan or a tank, or any number of other situations where the consequences of not understanding how a decision was made are that people are placing their fates in the hands of unaccountable machinery.

One of the points of building these systems is to do better than human-driven.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#305

Post by uniqueid »

IshKebab wrote: post #288
uniqueid wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? I could divide people into 'tall', 'medium' and 'short' buckets. Someone else could categorize them all into just two categories (eg: 'tall' and 'short') instead, and someone else might argue that I've chosen bad cutoffs, and tell me I incorrectly put a bunch of 'medium' people in the 'short' bucket. Peop…

That is only true if the distribution of things within the continuum is not "lumpy". For height it isn't, but for other things it is. For example gender is highly bimodal, yet still a continuum. Would you say that "male" and "female" are subjective socially constructed categories? Of course not. Race is probably somewhere in-between. There are people all over the spectrum but there are pretty clear large groups with…

Your comment merits a more thoughtful reply than this, but I discussed the same issue here some months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26876186) and it's hard to work up enthusiasm now.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#306

Post by zepto »

tpm wrote: post #299
zepto wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

According to many proponents of CRT or wokeness, absolutely he becomes white. People from typically non-white ethnicities are routinely accused of being white if they adopt cultural traits associated with white people.

And it’s entirely possible that if he was adopted at a young enough age, whatever this AI is detecting would read him as white too, assuming his habits and diet affected his development, as they might.

Indeed that would be consistent with your claim that there is nothing genetic about race.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#307

Post by esyir »

mcguire wrote: post #231
esyir wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies. There's a reason for this, and that reason is cost. Even the relatively cheap microarray based tests that 23 & me uses are exp…

Does anyone really believe that medical logistics is the most common or most impactful use of "race"?

With regard to this topic, where we're literally discussing lk race in an xray?

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#308

Post by esyir »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #257
esyir wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly dislike (almost despise) this argument. Race is a surrogate variable for genetic history. The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry. Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to handwave it away do not change the fact that race and genetics are very much linked as it is used today.

> its utility is very much real What's the utility of the concept of race?

Low cost variable for modulating medical treatment? It's often used in such scenarios.

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#309

Post by romwell »

oh_sigh wrote: post #291
mcguire wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

OK, I'll speak in terms you might get.

Humans have a myriad of visible characteristics: height, weight, skin color, eye color and shape, hair color and type, shapes of facial features, and so on.

All these characteristics vary continuously.

If you see that data as points filling a high-dimensional cube, there's not going to be an empty space there.

Some areas are going to be denser than the others, but there are no gaps there.

What you try to do with "race" is you're trying to cluster this data.

But there really is only one cluster. Might as well call rand() a million times to get a bunch of points in 0..1, and cluster that.

Oh, but you've see black people! And white people!

Well yeah, but it's all those people filling the spaces in between any two points that make it impossible to draw the line.

The only way to draw the line is to make a call on where to draw it — that is, to make an arbitrary choice. Without it, your clustering algorithms would fail.

Yes, there are high-density peaks on this data, especially if you look at any single characteristic.

Yes, you can separate the peaks. But deciding on where to put the the threshold is choice — a social construct — that can leaves a lot of points without a "race" label (which race is Irish - Mexican?) and/or change which peaks make the cutoff (are Armenians a race, or noise in the dataset?).

>Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective

The scientists have two options:

A) Look at the original data which you used to assign the race label (skin color, hair type, etc), and see if there's any correlation of that data with diseases

B)Look at the data, cluster it using an arbitrary choice to be able to get more than one cluster, ignore a lot of people below the threshold, assign the labels, IGNORE THE RAW DATA, and then look for correlations between labels and diseases.

Which approach do you think is more scientific?

Re: AI Recognises Race in Medical Images

#310

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

KittenInABox wrote: post #234
mig39 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it click for me.

One of the other things to point out is that race doesn't correlate all that well with genetics in humans. People who would be described as black have so much genetic diversity that there can be no reasonable argument that there's a genetic basis for their racial label. Certain health conditions or biological differences often have to make far more specific categories than race.

Not sure why downvoted, this is correct. The rest of the world was populated by small (i.e. less genetically diverse) groups who came "out of Africa". So "Africans are more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined"

https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article/study-africans-mo...

https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa...

there are "Larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians" "and the genetic diversity in Eurasians is largely a subset of that in Africans, supporting the out of Africa model of human evolution"

https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269

The highest genetic diversity is actually among people who are small subgroups of "Africans" - Khoisan not Bantu.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24988-humanitys-forgo...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25471224/

So, genetically, just as you can't draw a line around "bony fishes" without also including land animals who are also descendants of bony fishes.

https://www.sciencealert.com/actually-there-is-no-such-thing...

Also, you can't genetically call "Africans" a well-defined sub-group of humans, excluding others.

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