<
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/doctors-catch-cancer-diagnosing-ai-144500810.html>
"Just when you thought you heard it all, AI systems designed to spot cancer
have startled researchers with a baked-in penchant for racism.
The alarming findings were published in the journal
Cell Reports Medicine,
showing that four leading AI-enhanced pathology diagnostic systems differ in
accuracy depending on patients‘ age, gender, and race — demographic data,
disturbingly, that the AI is extracting directly from pathology slides, a feat
that’s impossible for human doctors.
To conduct the study, researchers at Harvard University combed through nearly
29,000 cancer pathology images from some 14,400 cancer patients. Their analysis
found that the deep learning models exhibited alarming biases 29.3 percent of
the time — on nearly a third of all the diagnostic tasks they were assigned, in
other words.
“We found that because AI is so powerful, it can differentiate many obscure
biological signals that cannot be detected by standard human evaluation,”
Harvard researcher Kun-Hsing Yu, a senior author of the study, said in a press
release. “Reading demographics from a pathology slide is thought of as a
‘mission impossible’ for a human pathologist, so the bias in pathology AI was a
surprise to us.”
Yu said that these bias-based errors are the result of AI models relying on
patterns linked to various demographics when analyzing cancer tissue. In other
words, once the four AI tools locked onto a person’s age, race, or gender,
those factors would form the backbone of the tissue analysis. In effect, AI
would go on to replicate bias resulting from gaps in AI training data.
The AI tools were able to identify samples taken specifically from Black
people, to give a concrete example. These cancer slides, the authors wrote,
contained higher counts of abnormal, neoplastic cells, and lower counts of
supportive elements than those from white patients, allowing AI to sniff them
out, even though the samples were anonymous."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: December 23, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-23-146483756
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
