These Algorithms Look at X-Rays—and Somehow Detect Your Race
By Tom Simonite,
Wired
| 08. 05. 2021
A study raises new concerns that AI will exacerbate disparities in health care. One issue? The study’s authors aren’t sure what cues are used by the algorithms.
Photo licensed for use by CC BY-SA 4.0 on Wikimedia Commons
Millions of dollars are being spent to develop artificial intelligence software that reads x-rays and other medical scans in hopes it can spot things doctors look for but sometimes miss, such as lung cancers. A new study reports that these algorithms can also see something doctors don’t look for on such scans: a patient’s race.
The study authors and other medical AI experts say the results make it more crucial than ever to check that health algorithms perform fairly on people with different racial identities. Complicating that task: The authors themselves aren’t sure what cues the algorithms they created use to predict a person’s race.
Evidence that algorithms can read race from a person’s medical scans emerged from tests on five types of imagery used in radiology research, including chest and hand x-rays and mammograms. The images included patients who identified as Black, white, and Asian. For each type of scan, the researchers trained algorithms using images labeled with a patient’s self-reported race. Then they challenged the algorithms to predict...
Related Articles
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli, The New York Times | 09.24.2025
For some Greenlanders, sorry isn’t enough.
The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, made a special visit Wednesday to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, to apologize in person for a traumatic chapter in Greenlandic history, when Danish doctors forced birth control on...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Auriane Polge, Science & Vie [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.19.2025
L’idée de pouvoir choisir certaines caractéristiques de son futur enfant a longtemps relevé de la science-fiction ou du débat éthique. Aujourd’hui, les technologies de séquençage et les algorithmes d’analyse génétique repoussent les limites de ce qui semblait encore impossible. Au croisement...