Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have increasingly achieved expert-level performance in medical imaging applications. However, there is growing concern that such AI systems may reflect and amplify human bias, and reduce the quality of their performance in historically under-served populations such as female patients, Black patients, or patients of low socioeconomic status. Such biases are especially troubling in the context of underdiagnosis, whereby the AI algorithm would inaccurately label an individual with a disease as healthy, potentially delaying access to care. Here, we examine algorithmic underdiagnosis in chest X-ray pathology classification across three large chest X-ray datasets, as well as one multi-source dataset. We find that classifiers produced using state-of-the-art computer vision techniques consistently and selectively underdiagnosed under-served patient populations and that the underdiagnosis rate was higher for intersectional under-served subpopulations, for example, Hispanic female patients. Deployment of AI systems using medical imaging for disease diagnosis with such biases risks exacerbation of existing care biases and can potentially lead to unequal access to medical treatment, thereby raising ethical concerns for the use of these models in the clinic.

The use of machine learning (ML) in healthcare raises numerous ethical concerns, especially as models can amplify existing health inequities. Here, we outline ethical considerations for equitable ML in the advancement of healthcare. Specifically, we frame ethics of ML in healthcare through the lens of social justice. We describe ongoing efforts and outline challenges in a proposed pipeline of ethical ML in health, ranging from problem selection to postdeployment considerations. We close by summarizing recommendations to address these challenges. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science, Volume 4 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Background: As machine learning becomes increasingly common in health care applications, concerns have been raised about bias in these systems' data, algorithms, and recommendations. Simply put, as health care improves for some, it might not improve for all. Methods:Two case studies are examined using a machine learning algorithm on unstructured clinical and psychiatric notes to predict intensive care unit (ICU) mortality and 30-day psychiatric readmission with respect to race, gender, and insurance payer type as a proxy for socioeconomic status.Results: Clinical note topics and psychiatric note topics were heterogenous with respect to race, gender, and insurance payer type, which reflects known clinical findings. Differences in prediction accuracy and therefore machine bias are shown with respect to gender and insurance type for ICU mortality and with respect to insurance policy for psychiatric 30-day readmission.Conclusions: This analysis can provide a framework for assessing and identifying disparate impacts of artificial intelligence in health care. Bias in Machine Learning ModelsWhile health care is an inherently data-driven field, most clinicians operate with limited evidence guiding their decisions. Randomized trials estimate average treatment effects for a trial population, but participants in clinical trials often aren't representative of the patient population that ultimately receives the treatment with respect to race and gender. 1,2 As a result, drugs and interventions are not tailored to historically mistreated groups; for example, women, minority groups, and obese patients tend to have generally poorer treatment options and longitudinal health outcomes. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning offer the potential to provide personalized care by taking into account granular patient differences. Machine learning using images, clinical notes, and other electronic health record (EHR) data has been Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also pursuing a graduate education in medical sciences certificate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. She received a bachelor of arts degree in applied math-economics and computer science and a master of science degree in computational science and engineering from Harvard University.

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Increasingly large electronic health records (EHRs) provide an opportunity to algorithmically learn medical knowledge. In one prominent example, a causal health knowledge graph could learn relationships between diseases and symptoms and then serve as a diagnostic tool to be refined with additional clinical input. Prior research has demonstrated the ability to construct such a graph from over 270,000 emergency department patient visits. In this work, we describe methods to evaluate a health knowledge graph for robustness. Moving beyond precision and recall, we analyze for which diseases and for which patients the graph is most accurate. We identify sample size and unmeasured confounders as major sources of error in the health knowledge graph. We introduce a method to leverage non-linear functions in building the causal graph to better understand existing model assumptions.Finally, to assess model generalizability, we extend to a larger set of complete patient visits within a hospital system. We conclude with a discussion on how to robustly extract medical knowledge from EHRs.