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Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

newscientist.com

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Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#31

Post by chris_va »

ggggtez wrote: post #25

As an expert in machine learning, I don't see how someone would expect this to work. Actually to predict a disease, you need true positives and true negatives. If you only had access to the true positive data, it would be a lot harder to predict accurately.

Seems pretty simple, really.

1000 patients come in with symptoms that look like cancer at year 0.

100 actually get diagnosed with cancer at some point between year 0 and year 5.

Presumably, the remaining 900 didn't have cancer at year 0.

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#32

Post by chris_va »

buro9 wrote: post #10
nezumi wrote: post #7

Terrible reporting. Improving health outcomes by AI analysis of patient data is a much bigger prize - morally and commercially - than anything which could be achieved through ad targeting. Google is far too smart to squander such an opportunity by abusing patients' trust.

The big problem is the precedent it sets for data access. What are the criteria for who gets access? What are the constraints of that access? This story covers the latter being blown apart, the constraints were poorly defined and implemented and thus even if the criteria is well defined access to far more data was made possible. I'm sure that few patients desire an end to research, or would argue that such access isn…

You are making some implicit assumptions that they data access isn't highly controlled.

I have seen a few of these sorts of deals killed because of data access concerns, and/or computation requirements ("you can have access to anonymized data, but you have to run your code in a sandbox on our health servers").

And, this is why we have legislation.

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#33

Post by njs12345 »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #28

The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system for England (source: Wikipedia) Putting that here because I was confused about what NHS was in the first place (I'm French).

The world's 5th largest employer (just after McDonald's)..

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#34

Post by arethuza »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #28

The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system for England (source: Wikipedia) Putting that here because I was confused about what NHS was in the first place (I'm French).

There isn't really a single NHS - there are four National Health Services for the four parts of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#35

Post by cromwellian »

rtkwe wrote: post #30
cromwellian wrote: post #24

I think this situation nicely juxtaposes positive externality with private rights. As an individual, you may wish to hoard all of your personal medical information. Doing so may provide marginal benefit or protection against some theoretical harms. However, much of medical science relies on large population studies. Is knee surgery worth it? Are breast exams? Do COX-2 inhibitors increase heart attacks? Enormous amoun…

> assuming they could not be de-anonymized That's where the problem is anonymizing data is really difficult and it takes only a few bits of info to associate that data with a name. It takes only 3 pieces of information to uniquely identify 87% of people, Zip code, birthday, and sex. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live... http://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.pd...

Right, which justifies the government signing closed source deals to analyze this data, with the threat of legal action for violations. They can stipulate that the results of such analysis should be made public.

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#36

Post by njs12345 »

cromwellian wrote: post #24

I think this situation nicely juxtaposes positive externality with private rights. As an individual, you may wish to hoard all of your personal medical information. Doing so may provide marginal benefit or protection against some theoretical harms. However, much of medical science relies on large population studies. Is knee surgery worth it? Are breast exams? Do COX-2 inhibitors increase heart attacks? Enormous amoun…

It's difficult - I have more of a fairness problem with this (such a deal would probably not be available to researchers or smaller companies) than a data privacy concern. As others point out downstream, I think it's not really in Google's interests to use the data maliciously and I have more faith in their opsec than that of any NHS trust.

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#37

Post by DanBC »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #14

This is probably one of the reasons some may be opposed to nationalized healthcare... The government making a widespread decision to send your medical data somewhere without your permission.

> The government

In this case the government would be the Department of Health. They've had no involvement with this.

"The NHS" would be NHS England, and they didn't set this up, although they might sta.rt being involved to check the controls.

The local NHS, the Clinical Commissioning Group, didn't set this up.

So we're talking about one hospital trust

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#38

Post by cronjobber »

cromwellian wrote: post #24

I think this situation nicely juxtaposes positive externality with private rights. As an individual, you may wish to hoard all of your personal medical information. Doing so may provide marginal benefit or protection against some theoretical harms. However, much of medical science relies on large population studies. Is knee surgery worth it? Are breast exams? Do COX-2 inhibitors increase heart attacks? Enormous amoun…

Nice try.

If this was about positive externalities, Google tech could have found its way into the NHS.

Instead, as always and every time, data found a way into Google.

Funny how that works.

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#39

Post by throwanem »

chris_va wrote: post #31
ggggtez wrote: post #25

As an expert in machine learning, I don't see how someone would expect this to work. Actually to predict a disease, you need true positives and true negatives. If you only had access to the true positive data, it would be a lot harder to predict accurately.

Seems pretty simple, really. 1000 patients come in with symptoms that look like cancer at year 0. 100 actually get diagnosed with cancer at some point between year 0 and year 5. Presumably, the remaining 900 didn't have cancer at year 0.

"Seems". You can't know what fraction of your remaining 900 had cancer but weren't diagnosed with it for any of a wide variety of reasons, from death through misadventure, through false negative, to simple loss to followup. Clinical studies are designed to exclude such confounding outcomes. It's very difficult to see how any study of this data could be designed to do likewise.

Re: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data

#40

Post by throwanem »

askldfhjkasfhd wrote: post #27
ggggtez wrote: post #25

As an expert in machine learning, I don't see how someone would expect this to work. Actually to predict a disease, you need true positives and true negatives. If you only had access to the true positive data, it would be a lot harder to predict accurately.

Can you explain what you mean a little more? It seems like by having complete medical records, there would be a great deal you could infer statistically. Do you mean that it's not sufficient to have a medical record that doesn't indicate knee issues? That you would need a medical record that confirms there are no knee issues?

If you want a reliable result, yes.

Consider: I may have a medical record that doesn't indicate knee issues because I have correctly been diagnosed with no knee issues. Or I may have such a record because I have been incorrectly so diagnosed, despite the presence of knee issues. Or I may have such a record because I haven't been to a doctor about my knee issues in the years since they've developed, and so no opportunity has arisen for my knee issues to be documented. Simply from a medical record reflecting no evidence of knee issues, you cannot know which of these, if any, is true.

As I mentioned in a reply to your neighbor comment, clinical studies are designed to exclude such confounders as these - and that's a considerable part of why such studies are so expensive to design and carry out. It's very difficult to see how such exclusion could be achieved with data of the quality which seems to be involved here.

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